CHAPTER XIII.

Next morning at breakfast, Paulus announced that he had resolved to go to Formiæ and seek an audience of the emperor himself.

"How will you get one?" asked Aglais; "and if you get one, what good will it do you?"

"It will depend upon circumstances," he replied; "for, whether I fail to get speech of the emperor, or, succeeding in that, fail to get justice from him, process of law remains equally open, and so does process of interest. Both means are, I suppose, always doubtful, and generally dilatory. I spoil no chance by trying a sudden and direct method of recovering our family rights; while if I succeed, which is just possible, I shall save a world of trouble and suspense."

After some discussion, his mother yielded to her son's impetuous representations, more with the view of undeceiving him, and reconciling him to other proceedings, than with any hope of a good result.

Paulus had taken his broad-brimmed hat, saying that in three or four hours he expected to be back again at the inn; but that if he did not reappear, they were to conclude that he had found a lodging at Formiæ, and that he was remaining there for some good reason; when the door was flung open, and breathless, radiant, holding an unfolded letter in her hand, Benigna rushed into the room.

"Read, read," she cried, "and give me joy! I was unjust to the noble prince."

She handed the letter to Aglais, who read aloud what follows:

"FORMIÆ.

"Ælius Sejanus, the prætorian prefect greets Crispus, keeper of the inn at 100 Milestone. Our Cæsar is so pleased with the slave Claudius, that he has resolved to give him his freedom and the sum of fifty thousand sesterces, upon which to take a wife and to begin any calling he may prefer. And understanding that he is engaged, whenever he becomes a free man, to marry your daughter Benigna, and knowing not only that good news is doubly agreeable when it comes from the mouth of a person beloved, but that to the person who loves it is agreeable also to be the bearer of it, he desires that your daughter, whose qualities and disposition he admires, should be the first to tell her intended husband Claudius of his happy fortune. Let her, therefore, come to-morrow to Formiæ, where, at the Mamurran palace, Cæsar will give her a message which is to be at once communicated to the slave Claudius. Farewell."

"I want to go at once to Formiæ," cried Benigna.

"Well, I am even now going," said Paulus; "and if you intend to walk, I will guard you from any annoyance either on the way or at Formiæ, a town which you know is at present swarming with soldiers."

This offer was, of course, too valuable not to be cheerfully accepted.

A few moments after the foregoing conversation, Paulus and Benigna left the inn of Crispus together. The roads were full of groups of persons of all ranks, in carriages, on horseback, and on foot. Some of these were bound countryward, but not one for every score of those who were bound in their own direction. No adventure befell them, and in less than two hours they arrived at their destination. It was easy to find the Mamurran palace, to the principal door of which, guarded by a Prætorian sentry on either hand, Paulus forthwith escorted Benigna.

There was no footway on either side of the street, and as they approached the door they heard the clang of the metal knocker resound upon _the inside_. At the same moment the sentinel nearest to them shouted "_linite_," (by your leave.) Two or three persons at this warning shrank hurriedly into the middle of the road; a Numidian rider made his horse bound aside, and the large folding-doors were simultaneously flung open outward.

Immediately appeared the very man in the dark-dyed purple robe of whom the little damsel was in quest, and upon whose personal aspect, already minutely described in a former place, we need not here dwell. A handsome gentleman, in middle life, with an acute and thoughtful face, who wore the Greek mantle called χλαῖνα, (_læna_,) but differently shaped from an augur's, followed. Both these persons moved with that half-stoop which seems like a continued though very faint bow; and when in the street, they turned, stood still and waited. Then came forth, leaning on a knight's arm, and walking somewhat feebly, a white-haired, ancient, and majestic man, around whose person, in striking contrast with the many new fashions of dress lately become prevalent, a snowy woollen toga, with broad violet borders, flowed. Under this toga, indeed, was a tunic richly embroidered with gold, and having painted upon it the head of the idol called the Capitoline Jove, half hidden by a wide double stripe of scarlet silk.

When this personage had come into the street, all those who chanced to be there uncovered. Tiberius, the gentleman in the Greek mantle, and the knight himself upon whose arm the object of all this reverence continued to lean, did the same; and it was thus that Paulus, who had already guessed from frequent descriptions formerly received, knew for certain that he beheld for the first time Augustus Cæsar, sovereign of three hundred million human beings, and absolute master of the known world. In a moment those who formed the personal company of the emperor resumed their head-gear; some soldiers who happened to be passing did the same, and proceeded upon their respective errands; but the inhabitants remained gazing until the group began to move on foot up the street in the direction of the temporary circus which had been completed by the knight Mamurra in some fields north-west of the town.

Paulus turned to Benigna and said, "You perceive the red-faced--ehem! the great man. He does not know you, though you know him. Shall I tell him who you are? Indeed, I have not come hither merely to stare about me; so wait you here."

He thereupon left her, and quickly overtaking, and then passing before, the group in which was Augustus, turned round and stood directly in their way, hat in hand; but all his sensations were different from what he had expected. He grew very red and shamefaced, and felt a sudden confusion that was new to his experience. As it was impossible to walk over him, they, on their part, halted for a moment, and looked at him with an expression of surprise which was common to them all, though indeed not in the same degree. The person who seemed the least astonished was the emperor; and the person who seemed more so than any of the rest was Tiberius. Some displeasure, too, seemed to flash in the glance which he bent upon the youth.

But Paulus, though abashed, did not lose presence of mind to such an extent as to behave stupidly. He said,

"I ask our august emperor's pardon for interrupting his promenade, in order to report to Tiberius Cæsar the execution of an order. Yonder is Crispus's daughter, illustrious sir," he added, turning toward Tiberius; "she has come hither according to your own commands."

"True," said Tiberius; "let her at once seek the prefect Sejanus, who will give the necessary instructions."

Paulus's natural courage and enterprising temper had carried him thus far; but his design of accosting and directly addressing Augustus Cæsar now seemed, when he had more speedily found an opportunity of doing so than he could have dared to hope, a strange and difficult undertaking. How he should procure access to the emperor had been the problem with him and his family heretofore; but now, when the access was already achieved, and when he had only to speak--now when his voice was sure to reach the ears of the emperor himself--he knew not what to say or how to begin. He had thought of splendid topics, of deductions which he would draw, certain arguments which he would urge--a matter very plain and easy: in fine, a statement simple, brief, and conclusive; but all this had vanished from his mind. There before him, holding back the folds of his toga with one white hand, upon the back of which more than seventy years had brought out a tracery of blue varicose veins--a modern doctor would call them--with the other hand, which was gloved, and grasping the fellow glove, laid upon the arm of the knight already mentioned, stood the person who, under forms, the republican semblance of which he carefully preserved, exercised throughout the whole civilized and nearly the whole known world, over at least two if not three hundred million souls, a power as uncontrolled and as absolute for all practical purposes as any which, before him or after him, ever fell to man's lot; enthusiastically guarded and religiously obeyed by legions before whom mankind trembled, and whose superiors as soldiers had not been seen then and have not been seen since; the perpetual tribune of the people, the prince, senator, perpetual consul, the supreme judge, the arbiter of life and death, the umpire in the greatest concerns between foreign disputants travelling from the ends of the earth to plead before him; the dispenser of prefectures, provinces, proconsulates, tetrarchies, and kingdoms; treated by kings as those kings were themselves treated by the high functionaries whom they had appointed or confirmed, and could in an instant dismiss; the unprincipled, cruel, wicked, but moderate-tempered, cold-humored, cautious, graceful-mannered, elegant-minded, worldly-wise, and politic prince, who paid assiduous court to all the givers and destroyers of reputation--I mean, to the men of letters. There he stood, as we have described him, holding his toga with one hand and leaning upon Mamurra's arm with the other; and Paulus stood before him, and Paulus knew not what to say; hardly, indeed--so quickly the sense of bashfulness, confusion, depression had gained upon him--hardly how to look.

"If you have heard," observed Tiberius at length, "pray stand aside."

Paulus, who, while Tiberius was speaking, had looked at him, now glanced again toward the emperor, and still hesitated, made a shuffling bow, and stood partly aside.

"What is it you wish to say?" asked Augustus, in a somewhat feeble voice, not at all ungraciously.

"I wish," said Paulus, becoming very pale, "to say, my sovereign, that my father's property in this very neighborhood was taken away after the battle of Philippi and given to strangers, and to beg of your justice and clemency to give back that property or an equivalent to me, who am my dead father's only son."

"But," said Augustus smiling, "half the land in Italy changed hands about the time you mention. Your father fought for Brutus, I suppose?"

"My father fought for you, my lord," said Paulus.

"Singular!" exclaimed Augustus; "but this is not a court of justice--the courts are open to you."

At this moment Sejanus and one whom Paulus presumed to be in Rome, Cneius Piso, attended by a slave, appeared from a cross street. The slave approached quickly, holding a pigeon; and having caught the eye of Augustus, who beckoned to him, he handed the bird to the emperor.

Paulus withdrew a little, but lingered near the group. Augustus, disengaging a piece of thin paper from the pigeon's neck, said,

"From Illyricum, I suppose. We shall now learn what progress those Germans have made. O Varus, Varus!" added he, in words which he had of late often been heard to repeat, "give me back the legions, '_redde legiones! redde legiones!_'"

A breathless silence lasted while Augustus perused the message taken from the neck of the carrier-pigeon. As he crushed the paper in his hands, he muttered something; and while he muttered, the scorbutic face of Tiberius (perhaps scrofulous would better render the epithet used by Tacitus) burned ominously. In what the emperor said Paulus caught the words, "_danger to Italy_, but Germanicus knows how."

"Varus lost the legions a thousand times, a thousand paces westward of this irruption," said Tiberius.

"A calamity like that," said Augustus, "is felt far and near. The whole empire suffers, nor will it recover in my time. Ah! the legions."

Paulus perceived that he himself was now forgotten; moreover, looking back, he saw the poor young damsel, left by him at the door of the Mamurran palace, still standing alone and unprotected; but some fascination riveted him.

In a moment a great noise was heard, which lasted a couple of minutes; a mighty roar, indistinct, blended, hoarse, as of tens of thousands of men uttering one immense shout. It was, had it lasted, like the sound of the sea breaking upon some cavernous coast.

Upon a look of inquiry and surprise from the emperor, Sejanus sent the slave who had brought the carrier-pigeon to ascertain the cause, and before the sound had ceased the messenger returned, and reported that it was only Germanicus Cæsar riding into camp. Augustus fixed his eyes on the ground, and Tiberius looked at Sejanus and at Cneius Piso.

The emperor, after a second or two of musing, resumed his way toward the rustic circus and the camp, attended by those around.

Paulus felt he had not gained much by his interview. He now touched the arm of Sejanus, who was about following the imperial group, and said, pointing toward the spot where Benigna still stood waiting,

"Yonder is Crispina's daughter, who is here in obedience to your letter."

Sejanus answered this reminder with a sour and peculiar smile.

"Good," said he; "she has come to announce the fine news to her betrothed. Let her tell him that he has only to break a horse for Tiberius Cæsar to obtain his freedom. I have no time to attend any more to slaves and their mates. She has now but to ask for Claudius at that palace. He has orders to expect her, and to receive from her mouth the pleasing information I have just given you."

Saying this, he walked away.

Our hero conceived some undefined misgiving from these words, or rather from the tone, perhaps, in which the prefect had uttered them. Unable to question the speaker, he slowly returned to poor little Benigna, and said, "Well, Benigna, I have ascertained what you have to do; and, first of all, Claudius expects you within."

As he spoke, he knocked at the door. This time only one leaf of it was opened, and a slave, standing in the aperture, and scanning Paulus and his companion, demanded their business; while the sentries on either hand at the sculptured pillars, or _antæ_ of the porch, looked and listened superciliously.

"Is the secretary-slave Claudius here?" asked the youth.

Before the porter could reply, steps and voices resounded in the hall within, and the porter sprang out of the way, flinging almost into Paulus's face the other leaf of the door, and bowing low. Three gentlemen, two of whom apparently were half-drunk, their faces flushed, and their arms linked together, appeared staggering upon the threshold, where they stood awhile to steady themselves before emerging into the street.

"I tell you, my Pomponius Flaccus," said he who was in the middle--a portly man, with a good-natured, shrewd, tipsy look--"it is all a pretty contrivance, and there will be no slaughter, for the beast is to be muzzled."

"And I tell you, my Lucius Piso," returned he on the left, a wiry drinker, "my governor of Rome, my dedicatee of Horace--"

"I am not the dedicatee of Horace," interrupted the other; "poor Horace dedicated the art-poetical to my two sons."

"How could he do that?" broke in Pomponius. "You see double. Two sons, indeed! How many sons have you? tell me that. Again, how could one man dedicate a single work to a double person? answer me that. You know nothing whatever about poetry, except in so far as it is fiction; but we don't want fiction in these matters. We want facts; and it is a fact--a solemn fact--that the slave will be devoured."

"I hold it to be merely a pleasant fiction," retorted Piso fiercely.

"Then I appeal to Thrasyllus here," rejoined the other. "O thou Babylonian seer! will not Claudius the slave be devoured in the circus before the assembled people?"

At these words our hero looked at Benigna, and Benigna at him, and she was astounded.

He who was thus questioned--a man of ghastly face, with long, black hair hanging down to his shoulders, and sunken, wistful, melancholy eyes--wore an Asiatic dress. He was not intoxicated, and seemed to have fallen by chance into his present companionship, from which he appeared eager to disengage himself.

Gently shaking off the vague hand of Pomponius Flaccus, he acted as the oracles did.

"You are certainly right," he said; but he glanced at Lucius Piso while speaking, and then stepped quickly into the street, which he crossed.

Each of the disputants naturally deemed the point to have been decided in his own favor.

"You hear?" cried Flaccus; "the horse is to paw him to death, and then to devour him alive."

"How can he?" said Piso. "How can he, after d--d--death, devour him alive? Besides, Thrasyllus declared that I was right."

"Why," shouted Flaccus, "if we had not been drinking together all the morning, I should think you had lost your senses."

"Not by any means," said Piso; "and I will prove to you by logic that Claudius the slave," (again at this name our hero and poor little Benigna looked at each other--she starting and turning half-round, he merely directing a glance at her,) "that Claudius the slave will not and cannot be devoured by Sejanus--I mean that beast Sejanus."

Paulus, chancing to look toward the two prætorian sentries, whose general he supposed to be mentioned, observed them covertly smiling. More puzzled than ever, he gave all his attention to the tipsy dispute which was raging in the palace doorway.

"Well, prove it then," roared Flaccus, "with your logic!"

"Have I not a thumb?" resumed Lucius Piso; "and can I not turn it down in the nick of time, and so save the wretch?"

"Ho! ho! ho!" laughed out the other; "and what notice will a horse take of your thumb? Is this horse such an ass as to mind whether your thumb be up or down, though you are governor of Rome?"

"Perhaps you think," retorted Piso, in a tone of concentrated bitterness, "with your rules of logic, that the horse is not properly trained to his manners?"

"Have I not told you," said Flaccus, "in spite of your rules of thumb, that the horse is not an ass?"

The rudeness and coarseness of Pomponius Flaccus had succeeded in sobering Lucius Piso. He here remained a moment silent, drew himself up with dignity to the full height of his portly person, and at last said,

"Enough! When you have drunk a little more, you will be able to understand a plain demonstration. But whom have we here? Why, it is our glorious Apicius, whose table no other table rivals for either abundance or delicacy. Who is your venerable friend, Apicius?"

This was addressed to a dyspeptic-looking youth, magnificently attired, who, in company with a person in the extreme decline of life, approached the door. Paulus and Benigna stood aside, finding themselves still constrained to listen while waiting for room to enter the blocked-up door of the palace.

"Is it possible," replied Apicius, "that you forget Vedius Pollio, who, since you mention my poor table, has often kindly furnished it with such lampreys as no other mortal ever reared?"

The old man, whose age was not redolent of holiness, but reeking with the peculiar aroma of a life passed in boundless and systematic self-indulgence, leered with running, bloodshot eyes, and murmured that they paid him too much honor.

"Sir, you feed your lampreys well," said Pomponius Flaccus, "in your Vesuvian villa. _They eat much living, and they eat well dead._"

"I assure you," said Pollio, "that nothing but humorous exaggerations and witty stories have been circulated upon that subject. I can, with the strictest accuracy, establish the statement that no human being ever died merely and simply in order that my lampreys should grow fat and luscious. On the other hand, I do not deny that if some slave, guilty of great enormities, had in any event to forfeit life, the lampreys may in such cases, perhaps, have availed themselves of the circumstance. An opportunity might then arise which they had neither caused nor contrived."

"The flavor, in other words, never was the final cause of any slave's punishment," said Lucius Piso.

"You use words, sir," said Pollio, "which are correct as to the fact, and philosophical as to the style."

"Talking of philosophy," said Apicius, "do you hold with this young Greek, this Athenian Dion who has lately visited the court, that man eats in order to live? or with me, that he lives in order to eat?"

"Horror of horrors!" murmured Flaccus, "the Athenian boy is demented."

"Whenever there is any thing to eat with you, my Apicius," said Lucius Piso, "unless there be something to drink with my Pomponius here, may I be alive to do either the one or the other."

"Why not do both?" wheezed Vedius Pollio. "Whither are you even now going?"

"To the camp for an appetite," said Pomponius Flaccus, descending the steps out of the palace hall into the street, and reeling against Paulus, who held him from staggering next against Benigna.

"What do you two want here?" he suddenly asked steadying himself.

"I am accompanying," replied Paulus, "this damsel, who comes hither by Cæsar's order."

"What Cæsar?" asked Pomponius.

"Tiberius Claudius Nero," returned Paulus.

He naturally supposed that this formal-sounding answer would have struck some awe into the curious company among whom he had so unwittingly alighted with his rustic charge.

"What!" exclaimed Pomponius Flaccus, "Biberius Caldius Mero, say you?"

Paulus started in amazement.

"_Ebrius_, drunk," continued Piso, _ex quo_--How does it go on? _ex quo_--"

"_Ex quo_," resumed Pomponius solemnly, "_semel factus est_."[160]

The astonishment of Paulus and Benigna knew no bounds. Was it possible that in the very precincts of Cæsar's residence for the time, at the door of an imperial palace, within hearing of two prætorian sentries, in the public street and open daylight, persons should be found, not reckless outcasts maddened by desperation, but a whole company of patricians, who, correcting each other as they might do in reciting a popular proverb, or an admired song, should speak thus of the man to whom gladiators, having not an hour to live, cried, "As we die we salute thee?" The man at whose name even courageous innocence trembled?

"I said," repeated Paulus after a pause, "Tiberius Claudius Nero."

"And I said," replied Pomponius, "Biberius Caldius Mero."

"Drunk but once," added Lucius Piso, who had evidently quite recovered from his own inebriation.

"Since ever he was so first," concluded Pomponius Flaccus.

A general laugh, in which all present joined save Paulus and Benigna, greeted this sally, and, in the midst of their hilarity an elegant open chariot of richly-sculptured bronze, the work being far more costly than the material, drawn by two handsome horses, and driven by a vigorous and expert charioteer, came swiftly down the street in the contrary direction of the camp, and stopped opposite the door.

As the horses were pulled back upon their haunches, a youth, tall, well made, and eminently graceful, sprang to the ground. He had a countenance in the extraordinary beauty of which intellect, attempered by a sweet, grave, and musing expression, played masterful and luminous. He was neatly but gravely dressed, after the Athenian fashion. The four personages at the door, who were, by the by, far more floridly arrayed, and wore various ornaments, nevertheless looked like bats among which a bird of paradise had suddenly alighted. No gayety of attire could cover the unloveliness of their minds, lives, and natures, nor could the plainness of his costume cause the new-comer to be disregarded or mistaken anywhere. In the whole company Lucius Piso alone was a man of sense, solid attainments, and spirit, though he was a hard drinker. Even the others, drivelling jesters as they were, became sober now at once; they uncovered instinctively, and greeted the youth, as he passed, with an obeisance as low as that performed by the _ostiarius_, who stood ready to admit him. When, returning these salutes, he had entered the palace, Piso said, for the information of Vedius Pollio, who had come from Pompeii, "_That is he_."

"What! the young Athenian philosopher of whom we have heard so much?"

"Yes. Dionysius, young as he is, I am told that he is certain to fill the next vacancy in their famous Areopagus."

"He is high in Augustus's good graces, is he not?" asked Pollio.

"Augustus would swear by him," said Flaccus. "It is lucky for all of us that the youth has no ambition, and is going away again soon."

"What does Biberius say of him?" inquired Apicius.

"Say? Why, what does he ever say of any one, at least of any distinguished man?"

"Simply not a word."

"Well, think then what does he think?"

"Not lovingly, I suspect. Their spirits, their geniuses, would not long agree. If he was emperor, Dionysius of Athens would not have so brilliant a reception at court."

"But is it then really brilliant? Does one so young sustain his own part?" asked Pollio.

"You never heard any person like him; I will answer for that," replied Lucius Piso. "He is admirable. I was amazed when I met him. Augustus, you know, is no dotard, and Augustus is enchanted with him. The men of letters, besides, are all raving about him, from old Titus Livy down to L. Varius, the twiddler of verses, the twiddle-de-dee successor of our immortal Horace and our irreplaceable Virgil. And then Quintus Haterius, who has scarcely less learning than Varro, (and much more worldly knowledge;) Haterius, who is himself what erudite persons rarely are, the most fascinating talker alive, and certainly the finest public speaker that has addressed an assembly since the death of poor Cicero, declares that Dionysius of Athens--"

"Ah! enough! enough!" cried Apicius, interrupting; "you make me sick with these praises of airy, intangible nothings. I shan't eat comfortably to-day. What are all his accomplishments, I should like to know, compared to one good dinner?"

"You will have long ceased to eat," retorted Piso, "when his name will yet continue to be pronounced."

"And what good will pronouncing do, if you are hungry?" said Apicius.

"What has he come to Italy for?" persisted old Pollio.

"You know," said Piso, "that all over the east, from immemorial time, some great, mysterious, and stupendous being has been expected to appear on earth about this very date."

"Not only in the east, good Piso," said Pollio; "my neighbor in Italy, you know, the Cumæan sibyl, is construed now never to have had any other theme."

"You are right," returned Piso; "I meant to say that the prevailing notion has always been that it is in the east this personage will appear, and then his sway is to extend gradually into every part of the world. Old sayings, various warning oracles, traditions among common peasants, who cannot speak each other's languages and don't even know of each other's existence, the obscure songs of the sibyls, the dream of all mankind, the mystical presentiments of the world concur, and have long concurred, upon that singular subject. Moreover, the increasing corruption of morals, to which Horace adverts," added Piso, "will and must end in dissolving society altogether, unless arrested by the advent of some such being. That is manifest. Haterius and others, who are learned in the Hebrew literature, tell me that prodigies and portents, so well authenticated that it is no more possible to doubt them than it is to doubt that Julius Cæsar was murdered in Rome, were performed by men who, ages ago, much more distinctly and minutely foretold the coming of this person at or near the very time in which we are living; and, accordingly, that the whole nation of the Jews (convinced that those who could perform such things must have enjoyed more than mortal knowledge and power) fully expect and firmly believe that the being predicted by these workers of portents is now immediately to appear. Thus, Haterius--"

"No," said Pomponius Flaccus, shaking his head, looking on the ground, and pressing the tip of his forefinger against his forehead, "_that is not Haterius's_ argument, or rather, _that is only the half of it_."

"I now remember," resumed Lucius Piso; "you are correct in checking my version of it. These ancient seers and wonder-workers had also foretold several things that were to come to pass earlier than the advent of the great being, and these things having in their respective times all duly occurred, serve to convince the Jews, and indeed have also convinced many philosophic inquirers, of whom Dionysius is one, studying the prophetical books in question, and then exploring the history of the Hebrews, to see whether subsequent events really correspond with what had been foretold--that seers who could perform the portents which they performed in their day, and who besides possessed a knowledge of future events verified by the issue, were and must be genuinely and truly prophets, and that their predictions deserved belief concerning this great, mysterious, and much-needed personage, who is to appear in the present generation. And then there is the universal tradition, there is the universal expectation, to confirm such reasonings," added Piso.

The astounding character, as well as the intrinsic importance and interest of this conversation, its reference to his half-countryman Dionysius, of whom he had heard so much, and the glimpses of society, the hints about men and things which it afforded him, had prevented Paulus from asking these exalted gentlefolk to make room for him and Benigna to pass, and had held him, and indeed her also, spell-bound.

"But how all this accounts, most noble Piso, for the visit of the Athenian to the court of Augustus, you have forgotten to say," remarked Pollio.

"He obtained," replied Piso, "the emperor's permission to study the Sibylline books."

"What a pity," said Flaccus, "that the first old books were burnt in the great fire at Rome."

"Well," resumed Lucius Piso, "he brought this permission to me, as governor of Rome, and I went with him myself to the quindecemviri and the other proper authorities. Oh! as to the books, it is the opinion of those learned in such matters that there is little or nothing in the old books which has not been recovered in the collection obtained by the senate afterward from Cumæ, Greece, Egypt, Babylon, and all places where either the sibyls still lived, or their oracles were preserved."

"But, after all," said Pollio, "are not these oracles the ravings of enthusiasm, if not insanity?"

"Cicero, although in general so sarcastic and disdainful, so incredulous and so hard to please," answered Piso, "has settled that question."

"He has, I allow it," added Pomponius Flaccus, "and settled it most completely. What a charming passage that is wherein the incomparable thinker, matchless writer, and fastidious critic expresses his reverential opinion of the Sibylline books, and demonstrates with triumphant logic their claims upon the attention of all rational, all clear-headed and philosophic inquirers!"

"I am not a rational, or clear-headed, or philosophic inquirer," broke in Apicius, "Come, do come to the camp; and do pray at last allow this foreign-looking young gentleman and rustic damsel to enter the doorway."

And so they all departed together.

The _atriensis_ had meanwhile summoned the master of admissions, who beckoned to Paulus, and he, followed by Benigna, now entered the hall, which was flagged with lozenge-formed marbles of different hues, and supported by four pillars of porphyry. The adventurers passed the perpetual fire in the ancestral or image-room, and saw the images of the Mamurras, dark with the smoke of many generations; they crossed another chamber hung with pictures, and went half round the galleried and shady impluvium, inclosing a kind of internal garden, where, under the blaze of the sunlight, from which they were themselves sheltered, they beheld, like streams of shaken diamonds, the spray of the plashing fountains, the statues in many-tinted marble, and the glowing colors of a thousand exquisite flowers. Near the end of one wing of the colonnaded quadrangle they arrived at a door, which they were passing when their guide stopped them, and as the door flew open to his knock, he made them a bow and preceded them through the aperture.

They noticed, as they followed, that the slave who had opened this door was chained to a staple. Several slaves, who scarcely looked up, were writing in the room which they now entered.

The master of admissions, glancing round the chamber, said, addressing the slaves in general, "Claudius is not here, I perceive; let some one go for him, and say that the daughter of Crispus, of the One Hundredth Milestone, has been charged to communicate to him the pleasure of Tiberius Cæsar touching his immediate manumission; and that I, the master of admissions in the Mamurran palace, am to add a circumstance or two which will complete the information the damsel has to give. Let some one, therefore, fetch Claudius forthwith, and tell him that he keeps us waiting."

During this speech, which was rather pompously delivered, Paulus noticed that, close to a second door in the chamber at the end opposite to that where they had entered, a young slave was seated upon a low settle, with a hide belt round his waist, to which was padlocked a light but strong brass chain, soldered at the nether link to a staple in the floor. This slave now rose, and opening the door, held it ajar till one of the clerks, after a brief whisper among themselves, was detached to execute the errand which the steward had delivered. The slave closed the door again, the clerks continued their writing, the steward half-shut his eyes, and leaned against a pillar in an attitude of serene if not sublime expectation; and Paulus and Benigna waited in silence.

During the pause which ensued, Paulus beheld the steward suddenly jump out of his dignified posture, and felt a hand at the same time laid lightly on his own shoulder. Turning round, he saw the youth who had a few minutes before descended from the bronze chariot.

"Ought I not to be an acquaintance of yours?" asked the new-comer with an agreeable smile. "You are strikingly like one whom I have known. He was a valiant Roman knight, once resident in Greece; I mean Paulus Lepidus Æmilius, who helped, with Mark Antony, to win the great day of Philippi."

"I am, indeed, his only son," said Paulus.

"You and a sister, I think," returned the other, "had been left at home, in Thrace, with your nurse and the servants, when some business a little more than three years ago brought your father and his wife, the Lady Aglais, to Athens. There I met them. Alas! he is gone. I have heard it. But where are your mother and your sister?"

Paulus told him.

"Well, I request you to say to them that Dionysius of Athens--so people style me--remembers them with affection. I will visit them and you. Do I intrude if I ask who is this damsel?" (glancing kindly toward Benigna, who had listened with visible interest.)

Paulus told him, in a few rapid words, not only who she was, but with distinct details upon what errand she had come.

He had scarcely finished when Claudius, the slave, arrived breathless, in obedience to the summons of the magister.

"The orders of Tiberius Cæsar to me," observed this functionary in a slow, loud voice, but with rather a shamefaced glance at Dion, "are, that I should see that you, Claudius, learnt from this maiden the conditions upon which he is graciously pleased to grant you your liberty, and then that I should myself communicate something in addition."

"O Claudius!" began Benigna, blushing scarlet, "we, that is, not you, but I--I was not fair, I was not just to Tib--that is--just read this letter from the illustrious prefect Sejanus to my father."

Claudius, very pale and biting his lip, ran his eye in a moment through the document, and giving it back to Benigna awaited the communication.

"Well," said she, "only this moment have I learnt the easy, the trifling condition which the generous Cæsar, and tribune of the people, attaches to his bounty."

There was a meaning smile interchanged among the slaves, which escaped none present except Benigna; and Claudius became yet more pallid.

"The prefect Sejanus has just told Master Paulus," pursued the young maiden, "that you have only to break a horse for Tiberius Cæsar to obtain forthwith your freedom, and fifty thousand sesterces too," she added in a lower voice.

A dead silence ensued, and lasted for several instants.

Paulus Æmilius, naturally penetrating and of a vivid though imperfectly-educated mind, discerned this much, that some mystery, some not insignificant secret, was in the act of disclosure. The illustrious visitor from Athens had let the hand which lay on Paulus's shoulder fall negligently to his side, and with his head thrown a little back, and a somewhat downward-sweeping glance, was surveying the scene. He possessed a far higher order of intellect than the gallant and bright-witted youth who was standing beside him; and had received, in the largest measure that the erudite civilization of classic antiquity could afford, that finished mental training which was precisely what Paulus, however accomplished in all athletic exercises, rather lacked. Both the youths easily saw that something was to come; they both felt that a secret was on the leap.

"Break a horse!" exclaimed the slave Claudius, with parched, white lips; "I am a poor lad who have always been at the desk! What do I know of horses or of riding?"

There was an inclination to titter among the clerks, but it was checked by their good-nature--indeed, by their liking for Claudius; they all looked up, however.

"Your illustrious master," replied the magister or steward, or major-domo, "has thought of this, and, indeed, of every thing;" again the man directed the same shamefaced glance as before toward Dion. "Knowing, probably, your unexpertness in horses, which is no secret among your fellow-slaves, and in truth, among all your acquaintances, Tiberius Cæsar has, in the first place, selected for you the very animal, out of all his stables, which you are to ride at the games in the circus before the couple of hundred thousand people who will crowd the champaign."

"At the games!" interrupted Claudius, "and in the circus! Why, all who know me know that I an arrant coward."

Like a burst of bells, peal upon peal, irrepressible, joyous, defiant, and frank, as if ringing with astonishment and scorn at the thing, yet also full of friendliness and honest pitying love for the person, broke forth the laugh of Paulus. It was so genuine and so infectious, that even Dion smiled in a critical, musing way, while all the slaves chuckled audibly, and the slave chained to the staple near the door rattled his brass fastenings at his sides. Only three individuals preserved their gravity, the shamefaced steward, poor little frightened Benigna, and the astonished Claudius himself.

"In the second place," pursued the magister or steward, "besides choosing for you the very animal, the individual and particular horse, which you are to ride, the Cæsar has considerately determined and decided, in view of your deserved popularity among all your acquaintances, that, if any acquaintance of yours, any of your numerous friends, any other person, in fine, whoever, in your stead shall volunteer to break this horse for Tiberius Cæsar, you shall receive your freedom and the fifty thousand sesterces the very next morning, exactly the same."

A rather weak and vague murmur of applause from the slaves followed this official statement.

"And so the Cæsar," said Claudius, "has both selected me the steed, and has allowed me a substitute to break him, if I can find any substitute. Suppose, however, that I decline such conditions of liberty altogether--what then?"

"Then Tiberius Cæsar sells you to-morrow morning to Vedius Pollio of Pompeii, who has come hither on purpose to buy you, and carry you home to his Cumæan villa."

"To his tank, you mean," replied poor Claudius, "in order that I may fatten his lampreys. I am in a pretty species of predicament. But name the horse which I am to break at the games."

Dion turned his head slightly toward the steward, who was about to answer, and the steward remained silent. A sort of excitement shot through the apartment.

"Name the horse, if you please, honored magister," said Claudius. Even now the steward could not, or did not, speak.

Before the painful pause was broken, the attention of all present was arrested by a sudden uproar in the street. The noise of a furious trampling, combined with successive shrieks, whether of pain or terror, was borne into the palace.

Dionysius, followed by Paulus, by Claudius, by the steward, and Benigna, ran to the window, if such it can be termed, drew aside the silken curtain, and pushed open the gaudily-painted, perforated shutter, when a strange and alarming spectacle was presented in the open space formed by cross-streets before the left front of the mansion.

A magnificent horse of bigger stature, yet of more elegant proportions, than the horses which were then used for the Roman cavalry, was in the act of rearing; and within stroke of his fore-feet, on coming down, lay a man, face under, motionless, a woollen tunic ripped open behind at the shoulder, and disclosing some sort of wound, from which blood was flowing. The horse, which was of a bright roan color, was neither ridden nor saddled, but girt with a cloth round the belly, and led, or rather held back, by two long cavassons, which a couple of powerfully-built, swarthy men, dressed like slaves, held at the further ends on opposite sides of the beast, considerably apart, and perhaps thirty feet behind him. One of these lines or reins--that nearest the palace--was taut, the other was slack; and the slave who held the former had rolled it twice or thrice round his bare arm, and was leaning back, and hauling, hand over hand.

The animal had apparently stricken on the back, unawares, with a fore-foot play and a pawing blow, the man who was lying so still and motionless on the pavement, and the beast, having reared, was now trying to come down upon his victim. But no sooner were his fore-legs in the air than he, of course, thereby yielded a sudden purchase to the groom who was pulling him with the taut cavasson, and this man was thus at last enabled to drag him fairly off his hind-legs, and to bring him with a hollow thump to the ground upon his side. Before the brute could again struggle to his feet, four or five soldiers who happened to be nigh, running to the rescue, had lifted, and carried out of harm's way, the prostrate and wounded man.

"That is the very horse!" exclaimed the magister, stretching his neck between the shoulders of Dion and Paulus, at the small window of the palace.

"I observe," said Paulus, "that the cavasson is ringed to a muzzle--the beast is indisputably muzzled."

"Why is he muzzled?"

"Because," replied the magister, "he eats people!"

"Eats people!" echoed Paulus, in surprise.

"O gods!" cried Benigna.

"Yes," quoth the steward; "the horse is priceless; he comes of an inestimable breed; that is the present representative of the _Sejan race of steeds_. Your Tauric horses are cats in comparison; your cavalry horses but goats. That animal is directly descended from the real horse Sejanus, and excels, they even say, his sire, and indeed he also in his turn goes now by the old name. He is the horse Sejanus."

At these words Paulus could not, though he tried hard, help casting one glance toward Benigna, who had been with him only so short a time before at the top of the palace, listening to the conversation of the tipsy patricians. The poor little girl had become very white and very scare-faced.

"Tell us more," said Dionysius, "of this matter, worthy magister. We have all heard that phrase of ill omen--'such and such a person has the horse Sejanus'--meaning that he is unlucky, that he is doomed to destruction. Now, what is the origin and what is the true value of this popular proverb?"

"Like all popular proverbs," replied the steward, with a bow of the deepest reverence to the young Athenian philosopher, "it has some value, my lord, and a real foundation, although Tiberius has determined to confute it by practical proof. You must know, most illustrious senator of Athens, that during the civil wars which preceded the summer-day stillness of this glorious reign of Augustus, no one ever appeared in battle-field or festive show so splendidly mounted as the knight Cneius Sejus, whose name has attached itself to the race.

"His horse, which was of enormous proportions, like the beast you have just beheld, would try to throw you first and would try to eat you afterward. Few could ride him: and then his plan was simple. Those whom he threw he would beat to death with his paws, and then tear them to pieces with his teeth. Moreover, if he could not dislodge his rider from the ephippia by honest plunging and fair play, he would writhe his neck round like a serpent--indeed, the square front, large eyes, and supple neck remind one of a serpent; he would twist his head back, I say, all white and dazzling, with the ears laid close, the lips drawn away, and the glitter of his teeth displayed, and, seizing the knee-cap or the shinbone, would tear it off, and bring down the best horseman that ever bestrode a Bucephalus. What usually followed was frightful to behold; for, once a rider was dismounted, the shoulder has been seen to come away between the brute's teeth, with knots and tresses of tendons dripping blood like tendrils, and the ferocious horse has been known with his great fat grinders to crush the skull of the fallen person, and lap up the brains--as you would crack a nut--after which, he paws the prostrate figure till it no longer resembles the form of man. But the present horse Sejanus, which you have just beheld, excels all in strength, beauty, and ferocity; he belongs to my master Tiberius."

"Ah gods!" exclaimed poor Benigna; "this is the description of a demon rather than of a beast."

Dionysius and Paulus exchanged one significant glance, and the former said:

"What became of the first possessor, who yields his name to so unexampled a breed of horses? what became of the knight Sejus?"

"A whisper had transpired, illustrious sir," replied the steward, "that this unhappy man had fed the brute upon human flesh. Mark Antony, who coveted possession of the horse, brought some accusation, but not this, against the knight, who was eventually put to death; but Dolabella, the former lieutenant of Julius Cæsar, had just before given a hundred thousand sesterces (£800) to Sejus for the animal; therefore Antony killed the knight for nothing, and failed to get Sejanus; at least he failed that time. Dolabella, however, did not prosper; he almost immediately afterward murdered himself. Cassius thereupon became the next master of the Sejan horse, and Cassius rode him at the fatal battle of Philippi, losing which, Cassius in his turn, after that resolute fashion of which we all have heard, put an end to his own existence."

"To one form of it," observed Dionysius.

"This time," continued the magister, bowing, "Mark Antony had his way--he became at last the lord of the Sejan horse, but likewise he, in his turn, was doomed to exemplify the brute's ominous reputation; for Antony, as you know, killed himself a little subsequently at Alexandria. The horse had four proprietors in a very short period, and in immediate succession, the first of whom was cruelly slain, and the three others slew themselves. Hence, noble sir, the proverb."

By this time, the magister had told his tale, the street outside had become empty and silent, and the parties within the chamber had thoroughly mastered and understood the horrible truth which underlay the case of the slave Claudius, and this new instance of Tiberius's wrath and vengeance.

The magister, Claudius, and Benigna had returned to the other end of the room, where the slaves were writing, and had left Paulus and Dion still standing thoughtfully near the window.

Claudius exclaimed, "My turn it is at present; it will be some one else's soon!"

He and Benigna were now whispering together. The magister stood a little apart, looking on the ground in a deep reverie, his chin buried in the hollow of his right hand, the arm of which was folded across his chest. The slaves were bending over their work in silence.

Says Paulus in a low voice to Dion, "You have high credit with the emperor, illustrious Athenian; and surely if you were to tell him the whole case, he would interfere to check the cruelty of this man, this Tiberius."

"What, Augustus do this for a slave?" replied Dion mournfully. "The emperor would not, and by the laws could not, interfere with Vedius Pollio, or any private knight, in the treatment or government of his slaves, who are deemed to be the absolute property of their respective lords; what chance, then, that he should meddle, or, if he meddled, that he should successfully meddle, with Tiberius Cæsar on behalf of an offending mance? And this too for the sake, remember, of a low-born girl? Women are accounted void of deathless souls, my friend, even by some who suspect that men may be immortal. By astuteness, by beauty, not beauteously employed, and, above all, by the effect of habit, imperceptible as a plant in its growth, stealthy as the prehensile ivy, some few individual women, like Livia, Tiberius's mother, and Julia, Augustus's daughter, have acquired great accidental power. But to lay down the principle that the slightest trouble should be taken for these slaves, would in this Roman world raise a symphony of derision as musical as the cry of the Thessalian hounds when their game is afoot."

Paulus, buried in thought, stole a look full of pity toward the further end of the apartment. "Slaves, women, laws, gladiators," he muttered, "and brute power prevalent as a god. Every day, noble Athenian, I learn something which fills me with hatred and scorn for the system amid which we are living." He then told Dion the story of Thellus and Alba; he next laid before him the exact circumstances of Benigna and Claudius; relating what had occurred that very morning, and by no means omitting the strange and wonder-fraught conversation at the door of the palace, after which he added,

"I declare to you solemnly--but then I am no more than an uninstructed youth, having neither your natural gifts nor your acquired knowledge--I never heard any thing more enchanting, more exalted, more consoling, and to my poor mind more reasonable, or more probable, than that some god is quickly to come down from heaven and reform and control this abominable world. Why do I say probable? Because it would be god-like to do it. I would ask nothing better, therefore, than to be allowed to join you and go with you all over the world; searching and well weighing whatever evidences and signs may be accessible to man's righteously discontented and justly wrathful industry in such a task; and I would be in your company when you explored and decided whether this sublime dream, this noble, generous, compensating hope, this grand and surely divine tradition, be a truth, or, ah me! ah me! nothing but a vain poem of the future--a beautiful promise never to be realized, the specious mockery of some cruel muse."

Dion's blue eyes kindled and burned, but he remained silent.

"In the mean time, listen further," added Paulus. "What would the divine being who is thus expected, were he in this room, deem of this transaction before our eyes? You have heard the steward's account of the horse Sejanus; you have heard Claudius's allusion to Vedius Pollio's lampreys. Now, you are a wise, witty, and eloquent person, and you can correct me if I say wrong--in what is the man whom the horse Sejanus, for instance, throws and tears to pieces better than the horse? In what is the man whom the lampreys devour better than the lampreys? I say the horse and the lampreys are better than the man, if mere power be a thing more to be esteemed and honored than what is right, and just, and honorable, and estimable; for the lampreys and the horse possess the greater might, most indubitably, in the cases mentioned. The elephant is stronger than we, the hound is swifter, the raven lives much longer. Either the mere power to do a thing deserves my esteem more than any other object or consideration, and therefore whoever can trample down his fellow-men, and gratify all his brutal instincts at the expense of their lives, their safety, their happiness, their reasonable free-will, is more estimable than he who is just, truthful, kind, generous, and noble--either, I say, the man who is strong against his fellows is more good than he who is good--and the words justice, right, gentleness, humanity, honor, keeping faith in promises, pity for poor little women who are oppressed and brutally used, virtue, and such noises made by my tongue against my palate, express nothing which can be understood, nothing in which any mind can find any meaning--either, I again say, the lampreys and the Sejan horse are more to be esteemed, and valued, and loved than my sister and my mother, or it is not true that the mere power of Tiberius, combined with the brutish inclination to do a thing, terminates the question whether it is right to do it. The moment I like to do any thing, if I can do it, is it necessarily right that I should do it? The moment two persons have a difference, is it right for either of them, and equally right for each of them, to murder the other? But if it was the intention of this great being, this god who is expected to appear immediately among us, that we should be dependent upon each other, each doing for the other what the other cannot do for himself--and I am sure of it--then it will please him, Dion, if I consider what is helpful and just and generous. Or am I wrong? Is virtue a dream? Are contrary things in the same cases equally good? Are contrary things in the same cases equally beautiful?

"Are my brutish instincts or inclinations, which vary as things vary round me, my only law? Is each of us intended by this great being to be at war with all the rest? to regard the positive power each of us may have as our sole restriction? to destroy and injure all the others by whom we could be served, if we would for our parts also serve and help? And must women, for instance, being the weaker, be brutally used? Tell me, Dion, will it please this great being if I try to render service to my fellow-men, who must have the same natural claims to his consideration as I have? or does he wish me to hurt them and them to hurt me, according as we may each have the power? Is there nothing higher in a man than his external power of action? Answer--you are a philosopher."

The countenance of Dion blazed for one instant, as if the light of a passing torch had been shed upon a mirror, and then resumed the less vivid effulgence of that permanent intellectual beauty which was its ordinary characteristic. He replied,

"All the philosophy that ever was taught or thought could not lead you to truer conclusions."

"Then," returned Paulus, "come back with me to the other end of the room."

"Benigna," said Paulus, "your kindness to my sister and mother, and your natural probity, had something, I think, to do with beginning this trouble in which you and your intended find yourselves. As you were not unmindful of us, it is but right that we should not be unmindful of you. Tiberius permits any friend of Claudius the slave to be a substitute in breaking the horse Sejanus; and Claudius is to have his freedom and fifty thousand sesterces, and to marry you, whom I see to be a good, honorable-hearted girl, all the same as if he had complied with the terms in person. This was thoughtful and, I suppose, generous of Tiberius Cæsar."

"Would any of these youths who hear me," added he turning round, "like to break the fine-looking steed at the games, before all the people, instead of Claudius?"

No one replied.

"It will be a distinguished act," persisted he.

Dead silence still.

"Then I will do it myself," he said. "Magister, make a formal note of the matter in your tablets; and be so good as to inform the Cæsar of it, in order that I, on my side, may learn place and time."

The magister, with a low bow and a face expressing the most generous and boundless astonishment, grasped his prettily-mounted stylus, and taking the pengillarin from his girdle drew a long breath, and requested Paulus to favor him with his name and address.

"I am," replied he, "the knight Paulus Lepidus Æmilius, son of one of the victors at Philippi, nephew of the ex-triumvir. I reside at Crispus's inn, and am at present a promised prisoner of Velleius Paterculus, the military tribune."

While the steward wrote in his tablets, Benigna uttered one or two little gasps and fairly fainted away. The slave Claudius saved her from falling, and he now placed her on a bench against the wall.

Paulus, intimating that he would like to return to Crispus's hostelry before dark, and having learnt, in reply to a question, that Claudius could procure from Thellus, the gladiator, a vehicle for Benigna, and that he would request Thellus himself to convey her home, turned to take leave of Dion.

The Athenian, however, said he would show him the way out of the palace. They went silent and thoughtful. In the impluvium they found a little crowd surrounding Augustus, who had returned from his promenade to the camp, and who was throwing crumbs of bread among some pigeons near the central fountain.

Two ladies were of the company, one of whom, in advanced age, was evidently the Empress Livia, but for whose influence and management Germanicus--certainly not her ungrateful son Tiberius--would have been the next master of the world. The other lady, who was past her prime, had still abundant vestiges of a beauty which must once have been very remarkable.

She was painted red and plastered white, with immense care, to look some fifteen years younger than she truly was.

Her countenance betrayed to a good physiognomist, at first glance, the horrible life she had led. Paulus, whose experience was little, and, although she fastened upon him a flaming glance, which she intended to be full both of condescension and fascination, thought that he had seldom seen a woman either more repulsive or more insanely haughty.

It was Julia, the new and abhorred wife of Tiberius. Not long before, at the request of Augustus, who was always planning to dispose of Julia, Tiberius had given up for her the only woman he ever loved, Agrippina Marcella.

Tiberius so loved her, if it deserves to be termed love, that when, being thus deserted, she took another husband, (Asinius Gallus,) he, mad with jealousy, threw him into a dungeon and kept him there till he died, as Suetonius and Tacitus record.

"Ah my Athenian!" said the emperor to Dionysius, placing a hand affectionately on the youth's shoulder, "could you satisfy me that those splendid theories of yours are more than dreams and fancies; that really there is one eternal, all-wise, and omnipotent spirit, who made this universal frame of things, and governs it as an absolute monarch; that he made us; that in us he made a spirit, a soul, a ghost, a thinking principle, which will never die; and that I, who am going down to the tomb, am only to change my mode of existence; that I shall not wholly descend thither; that an urn will not contain every thing which will remain of me; and all this in a very different sense from that which poor Horace meant. But why speak of it? Has not Plato failed?"

"Plato," replied Dionysius, "neither quite failed nor is quite understood, illustrious emperor. But you were saying, if I could satisfy you. Be pleased to finish. Grant I could satisfy you; what then?"

"Satisfy me that one eternal sovereign of the universe lives, and that what now thinks in me," returned the emperor, while the courtly group made a circle, "will never cease to think; that what is now conscious within me will be conscious for ever; that now, in more than a mere poetical allusion to my fame--and on the word of Augustus Cæsar, there is no reasonable request within the entire reach and compass of my power which I will refuse you."

"And what sort of a hearing, emperor," inquired Dion, "and under what circumstances, and upon what conditions, will you be pleased to give me? and when? and where?"

"In this palace, before the games end," replied Augustus. "The hearing shall form an evening's entertainment for our whole circle and attendance. You shall sustain your doctrines, while our celebrated advocates and orators, Antistius Labio and Domitius Afer, who disagree with them, I know, shall oppose you. Let me see. The Cæsars, Tiberius and Germanicus, with their ladies, and our host Mamurra and his family, and all our circle, shall be present. Titus Livy, Lucius Varius, Velleius Paterculus, and the greatest orator Rome ever produced, except Cicero" (the old man 'mentioned with watery eyes the incomparable genius to whose murder he had consented in his youth)--"I mean Quintus Haterius--shall form a judicial jury. Haterius shall pronounce the sentence. Dare you face such an ordeal?"

"I will accept it," replied the Athenian, blushing; "I will accept the ordeal with fear. Daring is contrasted with trembling; but, although my daring trembles, yet my trepidation dares."

"Oh! how enchanting!" cried the august Julia; "we shall hear the eloquent Athenian." And she clasped her hands and sent an unutterable glance toward Dion, who saw it not.

"It will be very interesting indeed," added the aged empress.

"Better for once than even the mighty comedy of the palace," said Lucius Varius.

"Better than the gladiators," added Velleius Paterculus.

"An idea worthy of the time of Virgil and Mæcenas," said Titus Livy.

"Worthy of Augustus's time," subjoined Tiberius, who was leaning against one of the pillars which supported the gallery of the impluvium.

"Worthy of his dotage," muttered Cneius Piso to Tiberius, with a scowl.

"Worthy," said a handsome man, with wavy, crisp, brown locks, in the early prime of life, whose military tunic was crossed with the broad purple stripe, "worthy of Athens in the days of Plato; and as Demosthenes addressed the people after listening to the reporter of Socrates, so Haterius shall tell this company what he thinks, after listening to Dion."

"Haterius is getting old," said Haterius.

"You may live," said Augustus, "to be a hundred, but you will never be old; just as our Cneius Piso here never was young."

There was a laugh. The Haterius in question was he to whom Ben Jonson compared Shakespeare as a talker, and of whom, then past eighty, Augustus used, Seneca tells us, to say that his careering thoughts resembled a chariot whose rapidity threatened to set its own wheels on fire, and that he required to be held by a drag--"_sufflaminandus_."

Dion now bowed and was moving away, followed modestly by Paulus, who desired to draw no attention to himself, when the steward, or _magister_, glided quickly up the colonnade of the impluvium to the pillar against which Tiberius was leaning, whispered something, handed his tablets to the Cæsar, and, in answer to a glance of surprised inquiry, looked toward and indicated Paulus.

Tiberius immediately passed Paulus and Dion, saying in an under tone, "Follow me," and led the way into a small empty chamber, of which, when the two youths had entered it, he closed the door.

"You are going to break the horse called Sejanus?" said he, turning round and standing.

Paulus assented.

"Then you must do so on the fourth day from this, in the review-ground of the camp, an hour before sunset."

Paulus bowed.

"Have you any thing to inquire, to request, or to observe?" pursued Tiberius.

"Am I to ride the horse muzzled, sir?" asked the youth.

"The muzzle will be snatched off by a contrivance of the cavasson, after you mount him," replied Tiberius, looking steadfastly at the other.

"Then, instead of a whip, may I carry any instrument I please in my hands?" demanded Paulus; "my sword, for example?"

"Yes," answered Tiberius; "but you must not injure the horse; he is of matchless price."

"But" persisted Paulus, "your justice, illustrious Cæsar, will make a distinction between any injury which the steed may do to himself and any which I may do to him. For instance, he might dash himself against some obstruction, or into the river Liris, and in trying to clamber out again might be harmed. Such injuries would be inflicted by himself, not by me. The hurt I shall do him either by spear, or by sword, or by any other instrument, will not be intended to touch his life or his health, nor likely to do so. If I do make any scars, I _think_ the hair will grow again."

"He will not be so scrupulous on his side," said Tiberius; "however, your distinction is reasonable. Have you any thing else to ask?"

"Certainly I have," said Paulus; "it is that no one shall give him any food or drink, except what I myself shall bring, for twenty-four hours before I ride him."

Tiberius uttered a disagreeable laugh.

"Am I to let you starve Sejanus?" he asked.

"That is not my meaning, sir," answered Paulus quietly. "I will give him as much corn and water as he will take. I wish to prevent him from having any other kind of provender. There are articles which will make a horse drunk or mad."

"I agree," replied Tiberius, "that he shall have only corn and water, provided he have as much of both as my own servant wishes; nor have I any objection that the servant should receive these articles from you alone, or from your groom."

Paulus inclined his head and kept silence.

"Nothing more to stipulate, I perceive," observed Tiberius.

The youth admitted that he had not; and, seeing the Cæsar move, he opened the door, held it open while the great man passed through, and then taking a friendly leave of Dion, hastily quitted the palace.

Tiberius, meeting Sejanus, took him aside and said,

"We have got rid of the brother! You must have every thing ready to convey her to Rome the fifth day from this. And now, enough of private matters. I am sick of them. The affairs of the empire await me!"

TO BE CONTINUED.

FOOTNOTE:

[160] Suetonius, Pliny, and Seneca all attest the currency of this and similar jokes against Tiberius during his very lifetime.

THE ANCIENT IRISH CHURCHES.

BY W. MAZIERE BRADY, D.D.

It was proposed, in the first draught of Mr. Gladstone's bill for the disestablishment of the Irish Church, to erect some of the cathedrals into national monuments, and to set apart toward the cost of their future repair a portion of the fund derived from the sale of church temporalities. This clause, however, was set aside; but even if it had been retained, it would not have given satisfaction. If it be the sincere desire of Mr. Gladstone to do justice to Catholic Ireland, and to conciliate her people, but one course remains open to him in regard to the ancient shrines of Catholic worship, namely, to restore them to their original owners. Many of these cathedrals and churches are altogether unsuited to the requirements of Protestant religious service. Some of them are too large to be maintained by the tiny congregations which occasionally visit them. Others require a costly annual outlay too great to be undertaken at the expense of the few families in whose neighborhood they lie. Would it not, then, manifestly tend to the benefit alike of Catholics and Protestants, that the latter, on terms advantageous to themselves, should yield to the former the possession of those buildings which Protestants do not require for _bona-fide_ ends, but which possess, in the eyes of Catholics, a peculiarly sacred, and, at the same time, a perfectly legitimate value?

Some ancient Catholic temple is perhaps situated in a district inhabited by twenty or thirty Protestants, and five thousand or ten thousand Catholics. The Protestants cannot fill a corner of the spacious fabric. They attach no value to it as the shrine of a venerated saint. Its very capabilities for an ornate and splendid Catholic ritual render it only the less fit for the simple requirements of Protestant worship. Protestants can gain nothing by retaining such a temple, save the privilege of keeping it as a trophy of a bygone and ill-omened ascendency. But if the British Parliament were to ordain that such temples should be purchased from Protestants, who scarcely require them, and given to Catholics to supply their evident wants, then a visible proof would at once be afforded to the Irish nation that disestablishment was no coldly conceived or niggardly administered instalment of justice, but a ready instrument for cordial reconciliation of creeds and nationalities.

It is ridiculous to urge as an objection, that Protestants in general attach a value, other than a pecuniary or political one, to the sites of the shrines of ancient Irish saints. Few Protestants have any veneration for St. Patrick, St. Brigid, or St. Nicholas. Not one Protestant in a thousand has so much as even heard of the names of St. Elbe, St. Aidan, St. Colman, or St. Molana. Irish Protestant bishops often deny the sacredness of holy places, and, when consecrating a site for the erection of a church, take the opportunity to explain such consecration to be a mere form of law. Some Protestant bishops entertained objections to the selection of any titles for churches, save those of Christ and his apostles. They thought it allowable to celebrate divine service in a building called Christ church, or St. Peter's, or St. John's, but conceived it to be scarcely tolerable and semi-popish to dedicate an edifice for worship under the invocation of St. George, St. Patrick, or St. Michael. In some dioceses in Ireland, during the last century, the consecration of Protestant churches was on several occasions designedly omitted in deference to such scruples of conscience. But the very names of the ancient Irish saints are precious household words with Catholics, who dearly prize the holy shrine, the sacred well, the hallowed ruins consecrated by the lingering memories of the virgins, confessors, and martyrs whose lives were devoted to the conversion of Ireland. The Catholic peasant, as he sorrowfully gazes upon the desecrated remains of some fallen abbey, or upon the mouldering walls of a roofless oratory, often breathes a hopeless prayer that an unexpected turn of fortune would once again fill with robed monks the arched and pillared cloisters, and replace the solemn solitary hermit in his peaceful cell. The reconsecration of their sacred shrines and temples, long defaced and profaned by neglect, would realize one of the fondest dreams of Irishmen. Why do not British statesmen utilize, for the general benefit of their country, the pious sentiments which, in a religious point of view, they as Protestants may fail to appreciate, but which, in a political aspect, it seems a criminal blindness to disregard? The legislators who freely vote imperial funds to provide Catholic priests and altars for Catholic soldiers, sailors, convicts, and paupers, cannot possibly entertain religious scruples against applying a portion of the ancient Catholic endowments of Ireland towards the purpose of restoring to their original uses some of the sites and shrines whose traditions are still potent enough in Ireland to sway the national sympathies.

No injury can result to Protestantism from the adoption of a course which would not merely increase the pecuniary resources of their church, but also tend materially to promote peace and good-will between men of different creeds. There are many ancient churches in Ireland which could be specified as almost useless to Protestants, but yet most precious and valuable if placed in the hands of Catholics. Many of the old Irish cathedrals are entirely, and some are almost entirely deserted. Ardagh, founded by St. Patrick, was reckoned among "the most ancient cathedrals of Ireland." Its first bishop--St. Mell--was buried "in his own church of Ardagh," wherein worship a few Protestants who care but little either for St. Mell or St. Patrick. The entire Protestant population of Ardagh parish is less than one hundred and fifty, while the Catholics number nearly two and a half thousands. There is but a scanty congregation of Protestants at Lismore, where St. Carthage, or at Leighlin, where St. Laserian was interred. At Howth, near Dublin, are the ruins--still capable of restoration--of a beautiful abbey and college. The college is occupied by poor tenants. The abbey is roofless, standing in a graveyard, choked with weeds and filth, of which the Protestant incumbent of the parish is custodian. St. Canice--the patron saint of Kilkenny--was buried, toward the end of the sixth century, at Aghadoe. "Aghadoe"--so wrote the Rev. M. Kelly, Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Maynooth, in his _Calendar of Irish Saints_--"at present is a ruin, its walls nearly perfect, but, like too many similar edifices in Ireland, all profaned by sickening desecration. Around it still bloom in perennial verdure its far-famed pastures, in a plain naturally rich, and improved by the monastic culture of a thousand years. The buildings are now used as ox-pens which were once the favorite home of the pilgrim and stranger." There are a score of other ruined temples like Aghadoe, which in their present condition are a disgrace to civilization; and yet are possessed of traditions which render them sacred in the eyes of Catholics, who would gladly rescue them from further decay and restore them to their ancient use.

Every tourist in Connemara has doubtless visited the famous collegiate church of St. Nicholas, in Galway. It is a vast temple, capable of containing six or seven thousand worshippers. Its size, the style of its architecture, and its historical traditions combine to render it eminently suitable to be the cathedral church of the Catholic population of Galway. It anciently was, not precisely a cathedral, but the church of the Catholic warden--a dignitary who possessed episcopal jurisdiction, being only subject to the visitation of the Archbishop of Tuam. It is now the church of the Protestant warden, or minister, who performs divine service, according to the Anglican ritual, in a portion of the transept, for the benefit of those members of the Anglican Church who inhabit the immediate neighborhood. There is now no Protestant bishop resident in Galway, nor has any such functionary since the era of the Reformation made Galway his headquarters. So that this once splendid building is absolutely thrown away upon Protestants, being above ten times too large for a parochial church, and being utterly useless to them for a cathedral. The fabric of this grand relic from Catholicity has been allowed to fall into decay to such an extent that about five thousand pounds are now required to restore it or put it into permanent repair. It is unlikely that the Protestants of Galway will contribute this sum, or take steps to prevent this noble national monument from sinking, at no distant period, into hopeless ruin. The population of the entire county of Galway consisted, in 1861, of 261,951 Catholics and 8202 Anglicans, only a few hundred of the latter being residents in the town of Galway and its suburbs. The Catholic wardenship was changed into a bishopric by Pope Gregory XVI., in 1830, when Dr. French, who was then Bishop of Kilmacduagh and Kilfenora, and also Warden of Galway, retired to this diocese. In the same year, Dr. Browne who was subsequently translated to Elphin, became the first Bishop of Galway. Neither Bishop Browne, nor his successor Bishop O'Donnell, nor Dr. McEvilly, who became Bishop of Galway in 1857, were able to provide a suitable cathedral for the Galway Catholics. The present pro-cathedral affords accommodation to about four thousand persons, and upon the occasion of missions is thronged to a dangerous excess. The Catholics of Galway would gladly avail themselves of any opportunity which would render it possible for them to obtain St. Nicholas, the church of their forefathers, for a cathedral. The restoration to Catholic purposes of that edifice, which is a world too wide for Protestant wants, would confer a singular benefit upon an immense number of Catholics, without inflicting the least injury upon Protestants. The present Anglican Warden of Galway is not young enough to enable him, by means of commutation under Mr. Gladstone's bill to do much toward providing an endowment for his successors. The payment of a few thousand pounds, out of the funds of the Commissioners of Church Temporalities, to the Galway Protestants, in compensation for the loss of a fabric which they find too large for use and too costly to repair, would enable them not only to obtain a more convenient place of worship than the corner of the spacious transept they now occupy, but also would help them to provide the nucleus of a local endowment for Protestant ministrations after the decease of the present warden.

The inhabitants of "the city of the tribes" entertain no higher veneration for the church of St. Nicholas than is felt by the men of Munster for the celebrated Rock of Cashel of the Kings. In ancient years the "Rock" was a natural fortress, standing high over the surrounding plain, and proudly overlooking the thronged city which lay beneath its shelter. Upon the elevated plateau which crowns the submit of the "Rock," now stand the ruins of the former cathedral, and other ecclesiastical buildings, including the famous chapel of King Cormac, all of which, to the infinite discredit of England, have long since been deliberately abandoned to decay. The Protestants of Cashel ceased, somewhat more than a century ago, to occupy the old Catholic cathedral as a place of worship. Their archbishop, an Englishman named Price, disliked the fatigue of ascending the gradual incline which leads to the "Rock," and removed his throne to the present cathedral, a barn-like edifice which stands on the level ground near to the episcopal palace. In 1838, Dr. Laurence, the last Protestant Archbishop of Cashel, died, and the see being reduced to a bishopric in union with three other dioceses, the Protestant bishop selected for his residence the city of Waterford in preference to Cashel. The beautiful cathedral, left roofless by Archbishop Price, and exposed since his time to the ravages of more than a hundred winters, is nevertheless still capable of restoration. The fabric, and the site whereon the cathedral and the other ruins stand, are at present vested partly in the Protestant dean and chapter, and partly in the Vicars Choral of Cashel. Upon the death of these officials, their rights will revert to the Commissioners of Church Temporalities. But these disestablished functionaries may perhaps find it to their personal advantage, as well as to that of their church, to make an earlier surrender of their territorial privileges. Whenever the Commissioners of Temporalities shall have become the owners of the Rock of Cashel, they will have to consider what they will do with it. They may determine to sell it, or else may transfer it as a burial-ground to the local poor-law guardians. Either alternative will be in the highest degree discreditable to British legislation. There is something atrocious in the idea of offering by public sale the temple whose almost every stone was marked by the pious workmen with the mystic tokens of their craft, and upon whose decoration kings were wont to lavish their choicest treasures to make it worthier for the worship of the Most High. It will be sacrilegious to submit to auction the soil wherein lies the mouldering dust of countless priests and prelates, chieftains and princes. On the other hand, it will be miserable and pitiable in the extreme to consign what may be termed the _Terra Sancta_ of ancient Ireland to the care of a pauper burial board. The zeal of rural guardians guided economically by the country squire, or his bailiff, would be worse even than the scornful vandalism of Archbishop Price. If the dead themselves could speak or feel, they would doubtless shudder in their tombs at the ring of the salesman's hammer, and protest with equal horror against the indignity of including the repair of their graves amongst the items of the county poor-rate. They would accept, in preference to such degradation, the rude guardianship of the elements. Nature, even when she destroys, is reverent, flinging a green pall of ivy around the tower which her disintegrating arms encircle, and spreading a rich carpet of moss over the dust of those whom she draws with the embrace of death to her bosom. The winds and waves, the floods and storms, may bring a more rapid dissolution upon deserted monuments of heroes, but at least they inflict no dishonor.

But why should the British Parliament suffer the national memorials of Ireland to perish without an effort to preserve them? It can be no gratification to the vanity of Great Britain thus to perpetuate, so long as a trace of the ruined temple or broken altar may be spared, the tokens of a policy able, indeed, to insult and to hinder, but powerless to supplant or destroy the faith of the Irish people. It cannot, alas! be denied that England seized by force upon that Catholic church of Cashel, banished its priests, and employed, for three centuries, its revenues to teach a hostile religion. That policy has been reversed. It would be a mode, no less honorable than wise, of confessing the folly and guilt of such a policy, were England to give back the ruins which have survived it, and allow the Catholic archbishop and clergy to restore and reconsecrate their ancient cathedral and celebrate again Catholic worship upon the Rock of Cashel.

Let us turn from Galway and Cashel to the metropolis of Ireland. It was felt, so far back as the reign of Elizabeth, that two Protestant cathedrals were too many for Dublin. "Here be in this little city"--so wrote the lord-deputy to Walsingham in 1584--"two great cathedral churches, richly endowed, and too near together for any good they do; the one of them, dedicated to St. Patrick, had in more superstitious reputation than the other, dedicated to the name of Christ, and for that respect only, though there were none other, fitter to be suppressed than continued."[161] And a few months later, the same chief governor of Ireland again reminded the queen's secretary of state of the uselessness of retaining St. Patrick's as a cathedral. "We have beside it," remarked Perrott, "in the heart of this city, Christ church, which is a sufficient cathedral, so as St. Patrick's is superfluous, except it be to maintain a few bad singers to satisfy the covetous humors of some, as much or more devoted to St. Patrick's name than to Christ's."[162] The rabid Puritanism of Lord-Deputy Perrott, who hoped that "Christ would devour St. Patrick and a number of his devoted followers too,"[163] was not utterly devoid of truth and common sense. The maintenance of the cathedral of St. Patrick has rather proved a hinderance than a benefit to Protestants. Its revenues have not been sufficient to keep up a separate choir of singers; for most of the St. Patrick's choirmen belong also to Christ church, and their efficiency is impaired by being divided between two cathedrals. But whatever may be the value of St. Patrick's as a place for the performance of church music, its inutility as a place for Protestant worship is notorious. Its situation is remote from the fashionable quarter of Dublin and from those streets which Protestants inhabit. Many Protestants flock to St. Patrick's to hear the choral music, or, as they sometimes profanely term it, "Paddy's Opera;" but very few, if any, attend that cathedral for the purposes of prayer or worship. In fact, St. Patrick's, in 1870, is what it was three hundred years ago, not only a superfluous cathedral, but one whose atmosphere is unsuited to the genius of Protestantism. There is no place in the Anglican ritual for the apostle of Ireland. His memory is not an object of religious veneration; nor was any day set apart for his honor by the compilers of the Protestant liturgy. His name, like that of any other saint, acts as a repellant, not as a stimulant, upon the devotion of Protestants. Sir Benjamin Guinness, who rescued from ruin the fabric of St. Patrick's, preferred to say his prayers and hear sermons elsewhere.

Now that disestablishment has come upon the Protestant church, the evil of having two cathedrals in Dublin appears greater than ever. How, possibly, can funds be provided by Protestants to maintain both churches, Christ church and St. Patrick's? The latter had nearly fallen to decay but for the munificence of an individual. The former is now in want of substantial repairs, absolutely necessary to preserve it from ruin. Yet it is clearly the pecuniary interest of Protestants to give up St. Patrick's rather than Christ church, because the money value of Christ church, such is its present condition, is insignificant; while that of St. Patrick's is considerable enough to defray the charge of restoring Christ church, and to leave over and above a wide margin of surplus, which the church body may employ as a Protestant endowment fund. The sum expended by the late Sir Benjamin Guinness on St. Patrick's is said to have been £100,000; and, according to a recently printed estimate of Mr. Street, a London architect of eminence, the sum of £8000 will be sufficient to rebuild one of the side aisles of Christ church, and put the rest of the building into a condition of permanent repair.

But there are other and more important considerations which make Christ church the more desirable cathedral for Protestants to retain. It is the old Chapel Royal of Dublin, the place where the deputies and chief governors were formerly sworn into office, and where the state sermons were preached before the lords and commons of the Irish parliament. The lord-lieutenant's pew is at present frequently attended by members of the viceregal staff and other government officials. The situation of Christ church in the immediate vicinity of the castle renders it suitable to be preserved as the state church in Dublin for the accommodation of royal visitors and Protestant viceroys. Christ church, moreover, is beyond question the chief cathedral of the Protestant archbishop and clergy of Dublin. The members of its chapter are few in number, consisting of a dean, archdeacon, treasurer, chancellor, and three prebendaries. The Protestant church body, if it determines upon supporting cathedral functionaries at all in Dublin, may find it practicable to do so with efficiency and some show of dignity in Christ church, without breaking up, or materially altering, the present constitution of the chapter. It is likely, moreover, that the Duke of Leinster, the head of the Protestant nobility of Ireland, who will receive a considerable sum of money under the church act, in compensation for the loss of his church patronage, will be glad to contribute toward the support of Christ church as the Protestant cathedral, especially as it is the ancient burial place of many of his ancestors, so famous in Irish annals under their historical title of Earls of Kildare.

To Catholics the gift of St. Patrick's would be precious, as the restoration to them of a cathedral which from its traditions has surpassing claims to their veneration. Their present pro-cathedral is regarded only as a temporary one, and possesses no historical memories to stir the feelings of its congregation. The constitution of the Catholic diocese of Dublin follows the model of St. Patrick's as far as regards the number and titles of the prebendaries; and little, if any, change would be necessary to render that cathedral fully answerable to the requirements of Catholic worship. And very glorious, truly, are the memories and traditions which cluster around the spot whereon St. Patrick himself erected a church, and hallowed it by his name. Near it was the fountain in whose waters the apostle baptized Alphin, the heathen king of Dublin. Usher, the learned Protestant antiquary and divine, tells us that he had seen this fountain; that it stood near the steeple; and that, a little before the year 1639, it was shut up and inclosed within a private house. The temple, built by Archbishop Comyn, on the site of the ancient church of Patrick, was styled by Sir James Ware "the noblest cathedral in the kingdom." It was dedicated to God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and St. Patrick. It was the burial-place of many Catholic prelates. In it were interred Fulk de Saunford and his brother John, and Alexander de Bicknor. Richard Talbot, brother to the famous earl, had his last resting-place before the high altar. Near the altar of St. Stephen lay Michael Tregury. Three other Catholic archbishops, namely, Walter Fitzsimons, William Rokeby, and Hugh Inge, were entombed in St. Patrick's in the early part of the sixteenth century--the last-named prelate dying in the year 1528. When the Reformation came, and when Henry VIII. attempted to force it upon Ireland against the will of the hierarchy and people, the cathedral of St. Patrick became exposed to the hostilities of the English despot and of Archbishop Browne, his agent. The new doctrines were urged in vain by that prelate, who is described by Ware as "the first of the clergy who embraced the Reformation in Ireland." The king's commission was as little respected as the homilies of Archbishop Browne, who advised the calling of a parliament to pass the supremacy by act, and wrote to Lord Cromwell, in 1638, complaining that "_the reliques and images of both his cathedrals took the common people from the true worship, and desiring a more explicit order for their removal_," and for the aid of the lord-deputy's troops in carrying out his unpopular designs. The clergy of St. Patrick's made so vigorous a stand against the reforming archbishop, that many of them were deprived of their preferments, and the cathedral itself was suppressed for nearly eight years, during Browne's incumbency. On Queen Mary's accession, St. Patrick's again resumed its Catholic splendor and dignity, but only to lose them once more when her successor, Elizabeth, thought it necessary for the security of her throne to remove utterly, if possible, the Catholic faith from her dominions. Thus the fortunes of St. Patrick's cathedral were, in a measure, identified with those of the Catholic religion in Ireland.

"The name of no apostle or evangelist," as was well remarked by Dr. Manning, the Archbishop of Westminster, in his sermon at Rome on the anniversary of St. Patrick, "carries with it a wider influence than that of the Apostle of Ireland, if we except only St. Peter, the prince of the apostles. No apostle or saint--Peter excepted--has so many millions of spiritual followers as Patrick. The Catholic hierarchy in England owes its origin to Patrick, through the Irish immigrants into Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, London, and other great manufacturing and commercial cities. The vast Catholic hierarchies in America, Australia, New Zealand, and other colonies of Great Britain, trace, in like manner, their spiritual lineage to Ireland and St. Patrick. Within the hall of the great Council of the Vatican St. Patrick counts more bishops for his children than any other saint, save Peter; for the prelates deriving their faith from Ireland are more numerous than those of any other nationality. And no apostle (Peter always excepted) has his anniversary celebrated in so many countries and with such demonstrations of joy as Patrick." Such indeed is the magic power, if the expression be permitted, which the very name of St. Patrick exercises over Irish Catholics in all parts of the world, that the restoration of St. Patrick's cathedral would be regarded by them as something far greater than the mere donation of a cathedral to the Dublin diocese. It would be received as a convincing sign that the demon of envenomed distrust has been exorcised, and that thenceforth English Protestants, as they have already long ceased to persecute Irish Catholicism by penal laws, would likewise abandon the indirect mode of persecution which consists in suspicion, falsification, and slander, in withholding cordiality, and in retaining, after the dog-in-the-manger fashion, what is useless to Protestants, for no apparent reason but to manifest a dislike to Catholics. It is with nations as with families or individuals. Two families, formerly at enmity and but lately reconciled, can hardly be said to enjoy a solid or thorough friendship so long as one of them causelessly keeps back the family pictures or sacred heirlooms of the other. France and England never could have entertained mutual sentiments of respect, if England had been so foolish or so malicious as to keep in St. Helena the body of Napoleon. The heirlooms whose restoration would have the happiest effect in bringing about amity between the English and Irish nations, are the ancient sacred places of Ireland.

FOOTNOTES:

[161] See _State Papers concerning the Irish Church in the Time of Queen Elizabeth_, etc. By W. Maziere Brady, D.D. London: Longmans. 1868. Page 90.

[162] Ibid. page 92.

[163] Ibid. page 91.

A LEGEND OF THE INFANT JESUS.[164]

In a small chapel, rich with carving quaint Of mystic symbols and devices bold, Where glowed the face of many a pictured saint From windows high, in gorgeous drapery's fold, And one large mellowed painting o'er the shrine Showed in the arms of Mary--mother mild-- Down-looking with a tenderness divine In his clear shining eyes, the Holy Child--

Two little brothers, orphans young and fair, Who came in sacred lessons to be taught, Waited, as every day they waited there, Till Frey Bernardo came, his pupils sought, And fed his Master's lambs. Most innocent Of evil knowledge or of worldly lure Those children were; from e'en the slightest taint Had Jesu's blood their guileless souls kept pure!

A pious man that good Dominican, Whose life with gentle charities was crowned; His duties in the church as sacristan, For hours in daily routine kept him bound, While that young pair awaited his release Seated upon the altar-steps, or spread Thereon their morning meal, and ate in peace And simple thankfulness their fruit and bread.

And often did their lifted glances meet The Infant Jesu's eyes; and oft he smiled-- So thought the children; sympathy so sweet Brought blessing to them from the Blessed Child! Until one day when Frey Bernardo came, The little ones ran forth; with clasping hold Each seized his hand, and each with wild acclaim, In eager words the tale of wonder told:

"O father, father!" both the children cried, "The _caro_ Jesu! He has heard our prayer! We prayed him to come down and sit beside Us as we ate, and of our feast take share: And he came down, and tasted of our bread, And sat and smiled upon us, father dear!" Pallid with strange amaze, Bernardo said, "Grace beyond marvel! Hath the Lord been here?

"The heaven of heavens his dwelling--doth he deign To visit little children? Favored ye Beyond all those on earthly thrones who reign, In having seen this strangest mystery! O lambs of his dear flock! to-morrow pray Jesu to come again to grace your board And sup with you; and if he comes, then say, 'Bid us to thy own table, blessed Lord!'

"'Our master too!' do not forget to plead For me, dear children! In humility I will entreat him your meek prayer to heed, That so his mercy may extend to me!" Then, a hand laying on each lovely head, Devoutly the old man the children blessed: "Come early on the morrow morn," he said; "To meet--if such his will--your heavenly Guest!"

To meet their pastor by the next noon ran The youthful pair, their eyes with rapture bright; "He came!" their happy lisping tongues began; "He says we all shall sup with him to-night! Thou too, dear father; for we could not come Alone, without our faithful friend--we said; Oh! be thou sure our pleadings were not dumb, Till Jesu smiled consent, and bowed his head."

In thankful joy Bernardo prostrate fell, And through the hours he lay entranced in prayer; Until the solemn sound of vesper bell Aroused him, breaking on the silent air. Then rose he calm, and when the psalms were o'er And in the aisles the chant had died away, With soul still bowed his Master to adore, Alone he watched the fast departing day.

Two silvery voices, calling through the gloom With seraph sweetness, reached his listening ear; And swiftly passing 'neath the lofty dome, Soon side by side he and his children dear Entered the ancient chapel consecrate By grace mysterious. Kneeling at the shrine, Before which robed in sacerdotal state, That morning he had blessed the bread and wine,

Bernardo prayed. And then the chosen three Partook the sacred hosts the priest had blessed, Viaticum for those so soon to be Borne to the country of eternal rest; Bidden that night to sup with Christ! in faith Waiting for him, their Lord beloved, to come And lead them upward from this land of death To live for ever in his Father's home!

In that same chapel, kneeling in their place, All were found dead; their hands still clasped in prayer; Their eyes uplifted to the Saviour's face, The hallowed peace of heaven abiding there! While thousands came that wondrous scene to view, And hear the story of the chosen three; Thence gathering the lesson deep and true-- It is the crown of life with Christ to be.

FOOTNOTE:

[164] Frey Luis de Sonsa, in the _History of the Dominican Order in Portugal_, relates this legend. The legend of the Infant Saviour coming to play with a child has been embodied in the poetry of many languages, especially the German.

PHASES OF ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM.

A man with the peculiar turn of Dr. Temple[165] for finding results of the past in the present, might perhaps be inclined to trace the time-honored cry of the English Protestants, "No popery!" to the temper of Henry VIII., who retained the whole of the Catholic doctrine in his creed except the supremacy of the pope. A Catholic will with good reason see in it a testimony from enemies to the unity of the church through the successor of St. Peter. The historian will point to the fact that Protestants have from the beginning agreed only in one thing, hostility to the church. The _Protest_ of 1529, from which they take their name, is the first example we have in history of a thing with which modern times are familiar--an arrangement on the part of those who, as the phrase goes, "agree in essentials," to act together for a time in order to accomplish some common end. In a similar way we saw Dr. Pusey take part in 1865 with the liberals, in order to promote the election of Mr. Gladstone as member for the University of Oxford. He afterward coquetted unsuccessfully with the Methodists. And last year he offered to join with the evangelicals in a protest against the elevation of Dr. Temple to the see of Exeter. Yet whatever may have been the case in times past, we should have supposed that the futility of such coalitions in these days had been long sufficiently evident. Dr. Pusey, we imagine, now feels little pleasure at having Mr. Gladstone at the head of affairs; and if the evangelicals had accepted his offer instead of rejecting it, he would have found out in the end that he had paid much for their help, and got very little by it.

By looking back to the circumstances in which Protestantism began, we find an explanation of its marked features--the variety of its differences, the fact that these find some common ground in the cry, "No popery!" and the inevitably logical tendency of Protestantism to dissolve into latitudinarianism. Of these the first two scarcely require to be illustrated; yet we may notice one singular illusion which has done more than any thing else to give a fictitious unity to the Protestant sects, and to invest their protest with a certain air of virtuous indignation; we refer to the common belief that the Bible is in some sense their peculiar possession, which springs from the doctrine that, so long as a man professes to get his creed out of the Bible, and the Bible only, it matters little of what articles his creed consists. This fiction has done good service in its day; but the Protestants are now likely to be worried by the fiend with which they used to conjure. They received the Bible from the church, and they turned it against the church. Now they find it in the hands of the modern critical school turned against themselves.

That the Protestants who separated from the church should have been able to accept Scripture as binding upon them, is not strange; although to a philosophical mind at the present day, the Protestant theory must present insurmountable difficulties. When men break off from a system in which they were born and bred, they cannot, if they would, make of their minds a _tabula rasa_, freed from all prejudices and associations, ready to receive whatever can be proved purely _a priori_. To attempt this would be to attempt to move the world without a fulcrum. The question, What can be proved _a priori_? is one which requires the course of many generations only for its statement; as for its solution, that may be said to have proved itself impossible. Men are obliged, when they change their opinions in some respects, to allow their conduct to be influenced by those opinions which they do not change; and in some cases it happens that it is impossible, upon any _a priori_ ground whatever, to draw the line between what they keep and what they reject. So it was at the foundation of Protestantism; and the effects of the modern "universal solvent" are due to what we have just stated, that, taking what _a priori_ ground you will, there is none which will support the Protestant without landing him at last in contradiction or absurdity. Thus, men in the sixteenth century could easily accept theories of Scripture interpretation which are now found to be untenable; and the result is fatal to those who are so deeply committed to the untenable theories that the loss of them involves the loss of their whole intellectual groundwork.

For the Protestants cannot, as the Catholic can, point to the striking fact of a general agreement extending over many centuries. We know that the Protestant critics profess to pick holes in the Catholic claim to general agreement; but what a beggarly appearance these attempts present when they are contrasted with the whole extent of the subject! What is the value of the few specks they point out in the vast current of ecclesiastical history? They find so little to say, that what they say is proved to be the exception and not the rule. But if we turn to their own case, what a difference do we find! There we have no question of pointing out flaws here and there; it is all one mass of flaws. Protestants may attack the claim of the church; but they themselves are not able so much as to put forward a claim. Nor do they venture to claim unity; some even avow their preference for diversity. Yet in practice we find them all acting as though each thought himself infallible.

This is the result of a very common human weakness. Just as the founders of Protestantism could quietly acquiesce in many things which they had imbibed from the Catholic world in which they were educated, so their successors quietly acquiesce in what comes to them from their fathers; and in both cases there is much which cannot be systematically exhibited without contradiction. But very few men care to set about the systematic exhibition of all that they profess to believe or to act upon. If it were otherwise, the Protestant theories of Scripture would never have been set up; and they are now falling before the exertions of men who insist upon having a clear view of what they are called upon to believe. When the reformers made their appeal to Scripture, it was impossible for men of different tempers, habits, and associations to agree upon matters of interpretation, even if the appeal had been made in good faith. As it was, the appeal was made subject to certain foregone conclusions, none of which, perhaps, could have been deduced from the mere text by any scientific process of exegesis. Servetus could not find the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in the Bible; and though he was little if at all to blame, according to Protestant principles, Calvin thought this failure worthy of death. Luther found in the Epistle of St. James much more than he wanted, and therefore he ejected it from the canon. Thus the appearance of an appeal to a common standard is an appearance only. It has been found to cover the widest variations both of doctrine and ritual. The only result of professing to be bound by the Bible is, that the text is wrested to mean any thing. No single system of exegesis, strictly applied throughout and deprived of all external suggestion or comment, will elicit a consistent whole from the declarations of Scripture. All sects can produce some texts in their favor, and all find some texts which they are obliged to explain away. Inquirers are supposed to bring to the task of examination a previous reservation in favor of the doctrines of their peculiar sect. If they do not, they are denounced as traitors and unbelievers, in spite of the ostentatious demand for a free inquiry. When Mr. Jowett proposed to use for the elucidation of Scripture those aids and methods which scholars have applied with great success to the profane classics, he was met with something more than outcry; he was actually persecuted. Yet his persecutors, who kept his salary as professor of Greek down to forty pounds per annum when the other similar professorships were raised in value to four hundred pounds, had nothing to offer by way of reason against his proposal. They stooped to effect their object by using the blind prejudices of country clergymen.

While the name of Scripture has always commanded respect, and in this way a sort of pretended unity has seemed to bind together the sects of Protestantism, every generation has seen less and less ground for establishing any thing like real visible communion. Scripture is useless to this end, because every party insists that it has Scripture on its side. Since Luther and Melancthon conferred at Marburg with Œcolampadius and Zwingli, the futility of conferences has been growing more and more manifest. But so soon as men despair of establishing union by convincing their opponents, they are driven, if they desire union, to propose compromise as the basis upon which to found it; and in religious matters, compromise means the surrender of faith to expediency. Many attempts have been made to induce the sects to coalesce by declaring only that to be obligatory in dogma which is common to all, leaving every thing else in the region of pious opinion; but a very natural and even laudable party obstinacy has always brought these attempts to nothing. The only persons who can approach such compromises with a safe conscience are latitudinarians, whose fundamental principle is the denial that any dogma is of necessity to salvation; and to the latitudinarian this privilege is useless, because his overtures are superfluous if made to latitudinarians, while they are sure to be rejected by the dogmatists. Yet it is hard for the dogmatic Protestant to justify the religious scruple which makes him unwilling to treat with the latitudinarian; for he is cut off from the appeal to the "faith once delivered to the saints," and forced to take up his position on ground which can equally well be claimed by his opponents. The scruples of either side are called prejudices by the other; and neither can rebut the accusation upon solid grounds of reason. A position like this is unstable; and though habit will enable a given set of men to hold their ground firmly against mere argument, yet argument does tell in the long run, and an unreasonable position cannot with security be handed on to the next generation. For the next generation is not born under the same circumstances as the former; and so it often happens that the habit which swayed the fathers is not formed in the children. Bit by bit the ill-established creed rots away, as the "universal solvent" is brought to bear upon the whole; and thus successive generations of Protestants are apt to be pushed nearer and nearer to latitudinarianism, sometimes without any notice being taken of the change. At length, perhaps, we see matters culminate in some portentous vagary, like that society which now exists, or existed not long since in London, which proposes to unite upon the basis of assenting to nothing at all.

The connection between faith and reason, and the influence which intellectual processes may lawfully exercise upon religious belief, are questions of profound difficulty. But without attempting to draw the line exactly between what is right and what is wrong, it may be possible to assert with confidence of particular cases that they lie on this or that side of the line. We would not rashly encourage persons who have been brought up in any dogmatic system, however ill-grounded or erroneous we may think their belief, to set about mocking their hereditary faith upon the strength of a shallow scepticism; still less would we employ ridicule against errors which cannot be ridiculed without shocking deep convictions; because we think that the cause of truth, in the long run, loses more than it gains by such means. But the logical weakness of the Protestant position is made apparent by the fact that it always does give way before reason. England has passed through many phases, and one of these was a phase of rationalism, that is, of appealing to reason only as the ultimate ground of religious belief. During that period the popular religion sank into a vague deism, together with a practical code of moral decency. Yet, during that time--the eighteenth century--the Church of England was peculiarly rich in men whom she esteemed great divines; but theology is excluded from the pages of these theologians. We find little beyond exhortations to the practice of virtue, grounded upon appeals to good feeling and the hope of reward; and what ought to be the dogmatic side of their teaching is occupied with proofs of the reasonableness of Christianity, or with statements of the evidences of Christianity--a Christianity which, in the popular mind, had lost all hold upon the divinity of Christ. Here, then, the old Protestant dogmatic position had gone down before reason; and its fall is the more notable because reason was not polemically directed against it. The men who had renounced the dogmatic position were the champions of the church, nor had they the least suspicion that they had surrendered every thing to the other side except an empty title. Circumstances had forced them to take their stand upon reason; and dogma was quietly and instinctively dropped out of sight, simply because it could not be defended by them in their position upon that ground. We shall see presently how close, at this time, was the resemblance between the orthodox and the deist.

But in the change of circumstances, which is the result of the course of time, there is something to compensate for this sinking and loosening of the dogmatic foundations of the Protestants. Something is gained in the greater ease with which later generations can shut their eyes to the presence of certain troublesome facts; and this is what Catholics mean when they speak of the children of schismatics as being less responsible than their fathers for the schism in which they find themselves. While the old Protestants were quite ready to take the Bible upon trust, they felt the force of certain texts which do not at all trouble their successors. No modern evangelical or Presbyterian feels any qualm of suspicion when he reads the words, "This is my body," nor does he trouble himself to seek out a plausible explanation. Macaulay said that "the absurdity of a literal interpretation was as great and as obvious in the sixteenth century as it is now." But, at all events, there is this great difference between the two centuries: that in the sixteenth, men felt bound to give some meaning to the text, while now, in the nineteenth, they feel able to pass it over without giving to it any meaning at all. Œcolampadius and Zwingli were at the head of the two principal sections of the sacramentarian party, who denied all real presence, and reduced the eucharist to a mere commemorative rite. There stood the text, and they felt bound to explain it somehow, so that it might agree with their opinions. They assigned the same general meaning to the whole, but they could not agree on the question whether "is" or "body" must be interpreted by a kind of metonymy, that is, saying one thing and meaning another. The subject is not a fit one for laughter; but it is hard to read without laughing that Andrew Carlstadt thought our Lord pointed to his natural body, when he uttered the words of the text. Men must be sore pressed before they will execute such wrigglings as these; and there are many signs of the existence of similar pressures at that day, from which modern Protestants are more or less relieved. Thus, Calvin was obliged for the sake of consistency to declare that Scripture shines by its own light; while the moderns can act as if it did without being obliged to say so. Again, when Archbishop Heath and his fellow-sufferers protested against their deprivation by Queen Elizabeth, she felt bound to make some attempt to argue from the fathers against the supremacy of the pope, though she could have found no pleasure in the task, because she had so little to say for herself. Now, when a modern Protestant uses arguments of this sort, it is only to satisfy his own private whims or scruples; but Elizabeth was peremptorily called upon to defend herself against adverse public opinion.

Nothing seems simpler to a modern Protestant than that a man should take his stand on "the Bible, and the Bible only;" nothing seems more strange to any one who has considered the various ultimate grounds and hypotheses upon which religious belief may be supposed to rest. It is not necessary to be always obtruding the question of ultimate grounds upon men's notice, because it is not required that all who believe shall be able to produce an accurate statement of the true ultimate grounds of their belief. But such grounds must be supposed to exist, and to be capable of accurate statement; and the statement of them is, at any rate, fatal to the Protestant position. We have seen how dogmatic theology disappeared from the popular mind under the rationalism of the eighteenth century. And at the time of the French revolution, it was found that when men deserted the church, they did not take their stand upon the Bible, but on atheism; and that when they ceased to be atheists, they became Catholics again, not Protestants; nor has Protestantism ever made any large number of converts, except in the sixteenth century. This was a sore puzzle to Macaulay, as he himself declares; but it is easily explained on the principles we have laid down. In the sixteenth century, men had no thought of inquiring about ultimate grounds of belief; they were determined to believe something, and they looked about for any proximate ground which was near at hand and plausible in appearance. At the end of the eighteenth century, the question of ultimate grounds had occurred to many, and they had answered that there were ultimately no grounds for believing any religion at all. When they changed this opinion, and determined to have a religious belief, they did not take up the Protestant position, because it was exploded; and the proof that it was exploded lies in the fact that they did not take it up. They could no longer play the part of arbitrary eclectics, selecting what they chose and rejecting what they chose from the Catholic system. They could not follow the example of Calvin, who first stopped short where he did, and then helped to burn[166] Servetus for going a few steps further. The French revolutionists were without any of those convenient traditional drags which hamper movement, and enable men to stop short at arbitrary points. They ruthlessly carried out their principles into the wildest and most ferocious excesses, things for which no logical consistency will compensate; but they _did_ carry them out. Therefore they were in some sense incapacitated for becoming Protestants, because they had once known what it was to carry out principles, and there is no set of principles whatever, which, if vigorously carried out, will land a man in Protestantism.

Men who found their belief upon the Bible alone, have first to determine the canon, then to settle the text, and lastly to interpret it. They have three questions to answer: 1. How is it known that the Bible is, as a whole, the word of God? 2. How is it known that the text is free from material corruption? 3. When men differ about its meaning, as they notoriously do, who is to decide between them? Until a reply is found to these questions, their position is open to attacks which cannot justly be stigmatized as the result of a shallow scepticism; and the best proof of this is the fact that it always goes down before reason. One or two men of learning and ability may be found to abide by the ancient ways; but they are deserted by the great majority of their fellows, and therefore they are the exception and not the rule. Who can pretend to doubt in what direction the whole of the learning and ability among the undergraduates of Oxford has been moving of late years? With hardly an exception, all the most promising among the young men have been moving away from those stand-points which Dr. Pusey finds necessary to his position as a Protestant; and if there be any exception to this general movement, he only marks the motion of the stream by standing still himself. This is because our three questions remain unanswered, while those who attempt to find such an answer as shall be acceptable to a rational mind, are denounced and persecuted. Yet these so-called liberals have a right to demand to be heard, and to be allowed to make out what they can by fair argument; nor has Dr. Pusey any right to be shocked when they find things in Scripture which he does not, except upon grounds which, if he would rigorously carry them out, would make him a Catholic. In his present position, we cannot guess how he would attempt to answer Charlotte Elizabeth, that great departed light of the extreme evangelicals. An acquaintance once suggested a doubt about the inspiration of the book of Revelation in these words: "You are a person of too much sense to believe that the binding up of certain leaves between the covers of the Bible makes them a part of it." This, in fact, raised the question how the canon is to be determined; and Charlotte Elizabeth was staggered for a moment, as she herself tells us. But the battle was turned by the following reply, which she piously believed to be dictated by God: "If you can persuade me that the book of Revelation is not inspired, another person may do the same with regard to the book of Genesis; and so of all that lie between them, till the whole Bible is taken from me. That will never do," etc. Having thus determined the canon, she promptly provides the interpreter. "Man can tell me no more than that God has clearly revealed" the Calvinistic doctrine of election and reprobation; "therefore, man cannot strengthen a belief founded on the sure word of God; _or if he tells me it is not revealed, I know that it is; because I have found it so, and relinquish it I never can_." (_Personal Recollections of Charlotte Elizabeth_, third edition, p. 134. The other passage quoted is at p. 130.) Charlotte Elizabeth, upon the strength of this, deals out the most uncompromising damnation to those who _have found that it is not_. And Dr. Pusey's estimable friend, Mr. Burgon, is equally ferocious toward those who doubt whether every syllable, point, jot, tittle, and full stop in the Bible is the express act of God. It would be impossible, we suppose, to convert the wood-and-leather man of Martinus Scriblerus, even though he "should reason as well as most of your country parsons."

Political circumstances have given such peculiar interest to the career of the Church of England that it deserves to be placed in a class by itself, apart from the other schismatical bodies which sprang up at the Reformation. Amid the storms of theological controversy she has always found a dubious sheet-anchor in the state, which secured to her a certain stability of political position, while it allowed her to drift through many widely different doctrinal phases. The tameness with which she veered about at the bidding of successive sovereigns, and the ease with which great changes were effected in her constitution, show that, in puritan phrase, her heart was not in the work. Historians are equally astonished at the power of the crown and the pusillanimity of the people. And there is ground for astonishment, though the facts are often described in terms of exaggeration. We are not to suppose that the passing of an act of parliament, or the "devising" of an ordinal by Cranmer, made a change in religion which was instantly felt through all corners of the kingdom. Multitudes had very vague notions of what was going on, and the only people who were thoroughly well informed, the courtiers, had their eyes fixed on church lands, not on theology. In some parts of the country, as in Lancashire, the change was little felt, and the Catholic religion remains there to this day a common heirloom. But in the mass of the people we quite miss that delicate spiritual sense, so keenly alive to the slightest variation from the faith, which gives such interest to the struggles of the church with the early heretics. When all has been said in their favor, it cannot be denied that the English have always shown themselves somewhat supine and spiritually sluggish. It is only the "right to tax themselves" which appeals to their energies with force enough to stir up a rebellion. The Scots took their religion into their own hands; but the English were contented to be led like sheep by Cecil and Parker.

The fundamental profession of faith of the Church of England, the Thirty-nine Articles, labors under this disadvantage, that it has never secured to the Established Church any closer union or more uniform dogmatic tradition than has been secured to Protestants in general by their common possession of the Bible. Very significant are those words in the _King's Declaration_ prefixed to the articles, in which his majesty finds so much comfort from the fact that nobody refuses to sign the articles, in spite of "some differences which have been ill raised;" and that, when they differ, "_men of all sorts take the articles of the Church of England to be for them_." What is the value of a formula which has been found compatible with the primacy both of Whitgift and of Sancroft? Only once did the spirit of the nation question the right of "men of all sorts" to "take the articles to be for them;" and that was when Dr. Newman took them to contain the Catholic faith. But this was due to the national hatred of popery, not to the stringency of the articles. Their weak blast has never blown either hot or cold. They look like the offspring of a union between inconsiderate haste and the latitudinarian hankering after conversions made by compromise. They limit their confidence like the sagacious Bottom. "Masters, I am to discourse wonders; but ask me not what; for if I tell you, I am no true Athenian."

The Elizabethan pacificators were of that sort who turn a country into a wilderness, and then boast that peace has been happily restored. Their Established Church was not a religion, but a machinery for enabling men to dispense with religion in their daily lives; and every attempt to graft religious feeling upon its sapless stock has ended in discord. Having no efficient discipline, no central authority, no energetic corporate action, no audible dogmatic voice, and no intelligible symbols of faith, and receiving its hierarchy from the state with abject submissiveness, it has never got so far as to attempt to fulfil any of the functions of the church. Its usual condition has been that of a bundle of differences held together by some fleeting economy or the presence of the state. Scarcely had it settled down into any thing like an organized polity, when the Puritan schism became formidably apparent; and by the accidental bias of political association, the Churchman and the Puritan became the champions respectively of prerogative and of liberty. The church rallied round the monarchy, because the favor of the crown was the breath of its nostrils; and persecution made the Puritans ripe for rebellion, and therefore ready to fight for the cause of liberty in any shape. The men who began the Great Rebellion were politicians, not religious enthusiasts; but they gained the day by enlisting on their side that religious enthusiasm which afterward declared that "the Lord had no need" of the Rump Parliament. When the intolerable government of the saints had made inevitable the restoration of Charles, the Established Church came back with the crown almost as naturally as the court of chancery and the privy council. Nothing could be more in keeping than that the ecclesiastical loyalty which had blossomed into the divine right of kings under the earlier Stuarts, should bear its fruit in passive obedience after the restoration. This much had been claimed by Henry VIII. in that edifying manual, _The Pious and Godly Institution of a Christian Man_; and it now became the touchstone of Anglican orthodoxy, almost to the exclusion of dogmatic considerations. It is true that Archbishop Laud had long before begun what he meant to be a theological reaction; but in his scheme the position of an altar or the use of a vestment counted for more than the gravest doctrinal questions, and he did not scruple to act cordially with men whose theological views differed very widely from his own. Whatever claim the Established Church may seem to have made to doctrinal infallibility or to magisterial decision, we think that it will be found on closer inspection to resolve itself into this, that every preacher was allowed to propound his own crotchets as infallibly true, provided only that his fidelity to the great dogma of passive obedience was beyond suspicion. Yet the prominence of this one proposition, and the vehemence of the clergy in preaching it, gave a certain aspect of unity to the church, and somewhat resembled the energy with which divine truth should be taught. The establishment has grown up into a great and conspicuous edifice, imposing from its majestic appearance and the apparent solidity of its foundation, and endeared to many by the recollection of sufferings endured in a cause with which it seemed to be inseparably bound up. Her ministers "agreed in essentials;" that is to say, in the fundamental rules of morality and passive obedience. It was the very strength of the church's position which made the violence of James II. so disastrous to her influence. The clergy found themselves before the horns of a fatal dilemma, when they were compelled to choose between their church and their king. The people, long used to hear that passive obedience was the first duty of a Christian, saw with a sceptical shock the defection of the clergy from their most sacred tenet. The non-jurors set up a fresh schism, and the shattered establishment could offer no effectual resistance to the phlegmatic William and his latitudinarian primate.

By the revolution the Anglican was finally and for ever cut off from all appeal to the living authority of the church; and it is well worthy of note that when the high Anglicans of this century, after the tractarian movement had set in, began to appeal to authority, they could find no living authority whither to carry their appeal, and were forced to set up the dead authority of books and records. At the close of the seventeenth century, there would seem to have been a good opportunity for anticipating by a hundred and fifty years the tractarian revival; and perhaps we may regard the career of the non-jurors as a proof that Sancroft and his brethren were utterly removed from every breath of the Catholic spirit. Cut off at that time from all appeal to authority, yet forced to lay down some ground of belief, it remained for the establishment to choose between reason and the witness of the Spirit, or the purer light manifesting itself to the separate conscience of the individual. This latter had been the basis of independency, and of those still darker sects which sprang from independency during the commonwealth. It had appeared that this guidance might be made to lead anywhere, except in any direction that a sane man would choose, and therefore it remained to put reason on its trial. Thenceforth the appeal of the Anglican was addressed to the reason of his hearers, and the reasonable was the basis of argument between parties. Different men believed different things; but each admitted that his creed must stand or fall according as it should or should not approve itself to reason. That knowledge of God and of his will which could be discovered by unaided reason was styled natural religion; and this was the whole of religion, according to the deists. According to the orthodox, natural religion was an outline, true as far as it went, the details of which were to be filled in by revelation. It was an obvious consequence of this view, that such parts of Christianity as could not easily be foisted in upon natural religion, came to be rejected as popish corruptions; and thus the distinction between the orthodox and the deist became at last very shallow. Bishop Butler, a man of fervid piety and with a natural bias toward asceticism, whose disposition made him an exception in many ways to the common tendency of the age in which he lived, complains that religion had in his day become too reasonable to have any connection with the heart and the affections. The least deviation in any direction from the surrounding dead-level was looked upon with suspicion; and Butler's _Durham Charge_ caused him to be accused of "squinting" toward the superstition of popery. After his death, it was said by many that he had died a Catholic; and Secker came forward with indignant zeal to defend his memory from the "calumny."

The depressing results of this prevailing tone are well shown by its effect on the religious views of such men as Sydney Smith. A touch of fanaticism has great claims upon our respect, when it is seen in contrast to the heathenism which regards a good education and gentlemanlike manners as the most necessary qualifications for the spiritual guide. Those evangelicals, the "patent Christians" of Sydney Smith, were the representatives inside the Church of England of the feelings and aspirations which animated the Methodists outside; and if the church had been the same in the days of Wesley that it was in the days of Wilberforce, there would have been no separation. We remarked that the close of the seventeenth century seems to have presented a good opportunity for anticipating the tractarian movement; but the times were not ripe for it, and the attempt was not made. Wesley did attempt to anticipate the evangelical movement; but the times were again not ripe, and the attempt ended in extensive schism. The evangelicals were the true forerunners of the tractarians; and perhaps the Methodists had opened the way to both. And as the Church of England first drove out the Methodists, but acquired by the process a certain capacity to endure Methodism, so, perhaps, she drove out the Tractarians, and acquired thereby a certain leaven which enables her now to endure with comparative equanimity the presence in her bosom of men who profess Catholic doctrine. The church had no fixed spirit; she was put in motion by the clamors of unstable popular opinion; and popular opinion is liable to be modified by the views with which it is brought into contact, even when it attacks them most fiercely. Yet we think we see signs that a time is coming when the comprehensive shelter of the establishment will no longer be open to all who choose to stand under it.

During this century three great movements have at different times made inroads upon the dead-level bequeathed by a former age. The evangelical movement has had its day, and its force is now spent; it no longer does active work, but only serves as a protest and drag. The tractarian movement has passed into a second phase; but it is still so far vigorous that it makes progress; that is, it increases continually the number of exoteric members who hang upon its skirts, while the esoteric members become more and more thorough-going in their assertion of Catholic doctrine and practice. The third and last movement is the critical, which is an attempt imported from Germany, and in England supported with great ingenuity and learning, to set up a criterion of religious truth and error apart from the reception of the Catholic scheme. For a long time there was room enough for all these parties to exist together; and if they quarrelled, it was rather because they had a taste for quarrelling than because they were brought into collision. But now there is no longer room for them, and collision is imminent. We may expect soon to see the battle fought out between them; nor would it have been delayed so long had there been any ground solid enough for pitting one against another. The English ecclesiastical law is so vague that men hardly dare to invoke it, even when they hope to find it on their side; for it is impossible to predict its course with certainty, when once it is set moving. But recent decisions have tended more and more to bring out this much, that an exact compliance with the present law, so far as it can be fixed, would be equally distasteful both to the evangelicals and to the tractarians. It is, in fact, a compromise constructed with unusual clumsiness, which is now for the first time being exposed to a searching examination; and it is likely to meet with the just fate of compromises, by being found equally hateful to both of the parties whom it was meant to reconcile. The critical school, who greatly outweigh the two others in learning and ability, are more evidently outside the letter of the present law, though its machinery is too clumsy to be used against them with any great effect. But the matter will not long be left in the hands of the present law; and it is hard to foretell the legislation of the future. Nobody, we think, can now doubt that a few years will see some great change, either of secularization, or at least of redistribution, in the ecclesiastical revenues. A large section of the tractarian party now cries out for disestablishment, as the only way open to them by which they may keep the Catholic faith.

When the catastrophe to which we are looking forward does come, no doubt there will be some splitting up of parties. Some, we hope many, of the tractarians will be received into the Catholic Church; and then it will be seen whether the remainder will be able to set up a free church, according to their darling scheme. Many of the evangelicals will doubtless join the various dissenting bodies; and some, perhaps, will coalesce with the liberals, (whom we called the critical school,) and it is possible that these latter may be left for a little while in possession of the whole of the temporalities of the church. This, however, we do not think likely; it is probable that disestablishment will be itself the occasion of a general dissolution. But the liberals have this great advantage on their side, that they are under no temptation whatever to split up. The agreement which holds them together is an agreement to differ; and their bond of union is a protest against all persons who consider dogmatic opinions of any kind to be a sufficient ground for breaking communion. Upon this understanding they are ready to shake hands with the whole world. And the opinions which are held by the esoteric members of the party (for some of them have opinions) are always embraced subject to the admission that they may possibly be false. They find truth everywhere, and close resemblances between things which are totally different. A bigot, according to the old joke, is a person who says that he is in the right, and that every body who differs from him is in the wrong; but a liberal is afraid to say that he is in the right, lest he should be obliged to say that somebody else is not. They avoid mistakes by saying as little as possible, and by using the vaguest terms they can find; and, above all, by cheerfully admitting that there is always a great deal to be said on both sides. As certain of their own poets have said,

"Methinks I see them Through everlasting limbos of void time Twirling and twiddling ineffectively, And indeterminately swaying for ever."

But it is only fair to say that here they are seen in their weakness, not in their strength. This vague and undecided habit of mind is the result of the circumstances in which they had their beginning. The spectacle of a great number of sects, each in practice arrogating to itself infallibility while they teach incompatible doctrines, produces different effects upon different minds. Its natural effect upon the shallow, who are just deep enough to find out that other sects exist beside the one in which they were brought up, is to breed scepticism. They know that two contradictory propositions cannot both be true, and they think that the one is as well supported by evidence as the other; and out of these premises, by the help of bad logic, they draw the conclusion that both must be false. But sounder intellects set about investigating more closely the criterion of truth and falsehood; and to such we owe the critical theory, which is not only ingenious, but even true so far as it goes. Something of the indecision of men who have seen so much of error that they now hardly believe in the existence of truth, clings to these critics; and this makes their proceeding seem to be sceptical when it is not really so. Their theory may be briefly summed up as follows: "Interpret the Scripture," says one,[167] "like any other book." This in his mouth was a brief way of bidding us measure religious truth by the same tests, while we seek it by the same methods, as other truth. It is well known that the labor of successive generations of scholars, following the same main rules of criticism, has made a great approach to uniformity in the interpretation of profane authors; and nobody doubts that the common consent of the critics, if it could be obtained, would be the best possible evidence to the unlearned of the true meaning of an obscure passage. It is inferred that the same critical methods may be applied to the Bible, and that the same approach to uniformity of interpretation may thus be secured.

This is a plausible theory; and it is sound so far as it goes. But it completely ignores the Catholic theory of the interpretation of Scripture. Its authors evidently suppose, for example, that if a text quoted by the Council of Trent in support of a doctrine could be critically proved irrelevant to the purpose, then the doctrine would be seriously shaken in the minds of Catholics. But this opinion rests on a profound misapprehension of the Catholic view. We accept the doctrine on the authority of the council, as the voice of the church, without criticising the source from which the words are drawn; and although the church in her decisions is guided by her unalterable tradition, yet it is a possible case that she might be quite assured of the fact of the tradition, and yet (to speak reverently) erroneously quote a document in evidence. A Catholic would be very cautious about attributing critical errors of this kind to a general council; but no theologian will deny that such a thing might happen. The function of the church in interpreting Scripture is by no means limited to ascertaining what the words written represented to the mind of the writer; the question is much wider than this, including all that was intended by God to be conveyed or suggested by the written words to the church at large. It does not follow that, because a given meaning is the only sense which the words could appropriately bear at the time when they were written, therefore no other additional sense was intended to be conveyed at some future time. In proportion as we exalt the degree in which a passage or a book is supposed to be inspired, so much the more probable does it become that its words will bear more than one meaning. In the higher sense of the word inspiration, the human agent becomes a mere instrument to convey a message, which he himself may possibly not understand at all. The meaning then lies wholly in the mind of God; and it is to be sought out by the divinely appointed interpreter. Hence is apparent the reasonableness, when they are taken together, of the two elements which make up the Catholic theory of Scripture--the inspiration of the written word, and the commission of the church to interpret. Both these things are ignored or denied by that school of criticism about which we have been speaking. Their view is quite incompatible with the Catholic view of inspiration, and they at the same time naturally deny the right of interpretation to the church, in order to give it to the scholar. And they therefore limit the function of interpretation to that which the scholar can reasonably attempt--the discovery of the meaning appropriate to the circumstances under which the words were uttered.

The theory, as it stands by itself, is a plausible hypothesis, much better able to bear examination than any other theory which Protestants have ever put forward. We do not think that it will fulfil the hopes of its friends, by securing the wished for uniformity of interpretation. And we cannot help thinking that its adherents ought to be on their guard against their peculiar faculty of finding out likenesses in dissimilar things, lest they should deceive themselves by fancying that they have secured uniformity when they have not. At present, they are rather apt to mistake the progeny of their neighbors for their own--

... "simillima proles Indiscreta suis gratusque parentibus error."

A few years ago, one of them placed on record his pious delight at the closeness with which Dr. Pusey's theological system resembled that of Mr. Jowett. He seemed to think that we are all of us getting year by year into closer agreement, and that the golden mean toward which all are gravitating is that hazy creed which looms vaguely upon the inner vision of Dean Stanley.

FOOTNOTES:

[165] Now Bishop of Exeter. He was the author of an ingenious but whimsical essay, styled, "The Education of the World," in _Essays and Reviews_, where he parcelled out the elements of our present civilization among different nations of antiquity. He almost seems to have thought that Turner owed his knowledge of painting, in some vague way, to Zeuxis and Parrhasius.

[166] To give Calvin his due, he was only for chopping off the head of Servetus. He called eagerly for his blood; but he was willing to temper justice with so much mercy as lies in substituting the axe for the fagot.

[167] Professor Jowett, _Essays and Reviews_, ninth ed. p. 377. This essay contains several jokes, which to us seem rather out of place. "Even the Greek Plato," says the professor, (p. 390,) "would have 'coldly furnished forth' the words of 'eternal life.'" The reader will remember the words of Shakespeare,

"The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables,"

meaning (as is shown by the preceding words, _Thrift, thrift, Horatio!_) that the marriage had followed so close upon the funeral that the pasties which had been hot at the one came up cold at the other. The new turn given by Mr. Jowett to his original has, we admit, a very humorous effect; but we cannot help thinking that he has been unseasonably witty.

THE SAGACIOUS WIG.

I.

A wig may be said to have two lives--the one with its own head, the other with its adopted head, or rather the head which adopts it; it has, therefore, a double chance for wisdom, and might be expected to profit accordingly. Generally speaking, this is the case, and wig and wisdom are almost synonymous.

Such wonderful tales had been told in a certain shop, by wigs that came back to be _fixed a little_, of the glory of their new abodes--wigs shorn from the very dregs of the people--from heads that had never been combed or petted or cared for--from heads houseless and hatless, that had been rained on and hailed on, and now in their second life dwelt in splendor unmitigated--that their discourses fairly curled up tighter every wig in the place. The shop had proved but a stepping-stone to blissful companionship with wits and statesmen; they reposed on the brows of sages and philosophers, shared the applauses of the multitude with popular orators, listened to the eloquence born of champagne and gaslight, and won the smiles and flirted with sweet ladies on Turkish divans and velvet _fauteuils_; all this and more, the wigs who came back had to relate. No wonder hopes were raised in each that went forth--hopes often delusive.

II.

If the few hairs which made a kind of rim round the head of Martin Tryterlittle had chosen to speak when he first clapped a wig on his bald crown, (bald though not yet old,) they could have told a long story, or rather a succession of many stories, of hope, expectation, and disappointment in the three great walks of life--money-making, love-making, and fame-making. Striving, ever striving, he hardly paused to look back at the profitless path he had trodden. The meeting accidentally with an old school-chum in fine broadcloth, or the ultra urgency of his landlady or some other disagreeable creditor, gave him occasionally more vivid views of things, and at such times he indulged in indignant and certainly very disrespectful language toward mankind in general and some individuals in particular; but generally his mood was patient endurance.

Success in life was an enigma. There was Job Lovemee, who began his career by ridiculously marrying a girl as poor as himself, and blessed since with six children, was getting as rich as a nabob; "while I," said Martin, "with no such drawbacks, am as poor as a church mouse."

It was a pleasant bright spring morning when Martin Tryterlittle suddenly resolved to turn over a new leaf in his book of life and mend its story.

"No wonder I cannot succeed," said he; "look at me!" So, as no one was by, he looked at himself, bit at a time, in the little cracked mirror which adorned his attic lodging-room. As the fortunes of Martin had been gradually sinking in the scale of social existence, he had physically been rising; that is, from occupying the first floor handsomely furnished, as the advertisement set forth, he had ascended to the attic, so nearly unfurnished that a bed, a table, a chair, and a broken mirror comprised its whole inventory.

"Look at me!" said Martin to himself, "threadbare and bald! No wonder I find nothing to do and no one to woo, and stay lagging behind in this march of mankind! I'll buy a wig to-day if I have to sell something to pay for it; for every body can see my head, but nobody--well, I'll button up my coat!"

It was no one's business how it was accomplished, as Martin truly said, but it _was_ done; the wig was bought and paid for, and rested now on his table in happy anticipation of the triumphs of the ensuing day. "No one will know me," said he. "I hardly know myself! O my wig! how happy we shall be; to thee shall I owe friends and fortune!"

It may startle some old-fashioned people to hear me assert that there was a responsive chord in the wig which answered to all this; but those familiar with modern metaphysical speculations will easily credit it. The wig, be it remembered, was once part and parcel of a sentient being; nor have we any reason to suppose that baking and boiling, in the process of wig-making, could in any way touch the spark immortal and invisible which once pervaded it. It is true that counter arguments might be advanced, and so there is no end to controversy; but there is a shorter way--and having demonstrated how the thing _might_ have been, we are satisfied to believe that so it _was_. Martin felt that his wig understood him. He was no longer alone in the world; companionship is something even with a wig, and he realized it as he laid his purchase carefully on the table and betook himself to his bed.

It was a long night; but day dawned at last, and, in the mean time, the whole future had been mapped out in the mind of Martin Tryterlittle. He rose early, made a careful toilette of such materials as were to be had, and sallied forth in thoughtful mood.

"Fame, wealth, love"--he conned them over in the order of valuation. "Fame (said he) I must first secure, and then I can command my own price in every thing else. Wealth will follow; and as for love, I need not go after that. Lord! there is no end to the love that comes tumbling in upon fame and money!"

_C'est le premier pas qui coute_--the problem was, how to be famous. There was a military and a civil career. There was invention in all the arts subservient to human needs. Could any wheels anywhere be made to go faster or smoother or with less smashing up? Well, as far as he saw, every thing was as good as it could be. Literature? Ah! that is a long track; besides, publishers are "lions in the way"--they cannot or will not always appreciate merit; fame seldom comes to the scribe till after he is beyond the reach of earthly pain or blame. "No," said Martin, "I must be famous living; what matters it after one is dead?"

"What is all this jabber about?" thought the wig; "surely my master has so many ways before him he cannot tell which to choose; but so jauntily I sit on his brow, he cannot fail of success whichever he takes."

This cogitating mood brought them step by step to a corner--one of those comers peculiar to great cities; where, while down one wide avenue the mighty human tide goes rushing and roaring, the narrow side street, like a little sluggish stream with scarce a perceptible ripple, joins it and empties its trifle into it. At this moment the usual tide in the great thoroughfare was swollen to a torrent; in plain words, at the corner Martin encountered a mighty mob. Hark! what a rabble shout! pell-mell--something had happened. Somebody had sinned, and very vindictive seemed the sufferers. Martin was caught in the current and twirled into their midst. Then was heard, "Oh! the man had a wig on!"--"wig!" "man!" "man!" "wig!" It went from mouth to mouth. Well, here was a man with a wig on in their midst; this must be he. The logic was conclusive; so Martin was seized and hurried along.

"What have I done?" cried he.

"Oh! yes, you know what you've done; and we know what you've done," shouted a dozen tongues. So, pinioned close, he was borne onward to the halls of justice, or injustice, as the case might be.

"Well, well!" thought the wig; "I little expected to get in such a fix with my gentleman, or I should have clinched his bald pate till he would have been glad to leave me for some other customer. It is disgraceful!"

"It's villainous! it's outrageous!" roared Martin.

"Shut up!" said a looker-on.

Now came a medley of questions and cross-questions, and ejaculations, and assertions, and confirmations, and contradictions, and, in short, the usual path of law and order was trodden over, till they settled down to unanimity on one point: the evil deed, whatever it was, (and very few seemed to know exactly what it was,) had been done by a man in a wig; but then it was a yellow-white, frowsy, sunburnt sort of a wig. Who could ever suspect that mass of dark, glossy curls of concealing a rogue? No one. So Martin was dismissed with the galling consciousness that for the great wrong done him there was no redress. A great wrong, too, he felt it; for what was he henceforth? Why, the very boys in the street would point to him as "the one wot was took up." He shrank from being seen; he had been too famous already.

He turned his steps homeward to collect his thoughts and rearrange his dress.

"This comes of a wig," said he; "a wig is deception, deception is rascality. A man guilty of one deception must not take it in dudgeon that he is suspected of another. I scorn fame! I go for money; and money shall make me famous. I began at the wrong end."

"Yes," (chimed in the wig,) "we'll be rich and loved; and the rest is all bosh."

It took Martin Tryterlittle a long time to put himself again in presentable order; one more such adventure, and he would be obliged to cease intercourse with that portion of creation who walk in sunlight, and join the human owls who, from choice or necessity, fly only by night. Their ways are not so widely different as a casual observer might suppose. Money is dear to both, and both are fond of taking short roads to it. Only in one thing they differ vastly--the day-worker sighs and seeks for notoriety, and often fails to obtain it; the night-prowlers have it thrust upon them, though they shun it. Martin had shared their hapless luck, and his ideas were changed; henceforth he scorned fame in all its phases, and exalted that other idol--money.

III.

A second time day-dawn called up Martin and his wig for new projects. It was a glorious morning. There was something exhilarating in that yellow flood of light which promised success. It was so cosmopolitan--that sunlight! It gave to all things such a gloss of delicate beauty. First, it just touched with gold the spires, and tallest trees and chimney-tops; then it slid down the house-side to peep in my lady's chamber; then it poured a glow all over the pavement, and made merry and warm all the little things, animate and inanimate, which but for that would have been dark and cold. Into this atmosphere of joyousness walked forth now Martin Tryterlittle to find something to do, some fellow-creature with a want unfilled.

It is surprising that any one ever begins to do any thing in this world, where every avenue to success is crowded, every necessity supplied, and every evil surrounded by a belt of antidotes; it takes immense penetration to discover where there is left any thing to be done.

"I must find a _want_," said he. And he turned to that dragon ever watchful of human interests--a newspaper. The _wanted_ there were many--workers for metals, accountants for wealth, delvers for the riches of earth; but all these anticipated a certain previous training. _Wanted, a teacher._ "That's it," said Martin. "I think I am fitted for that." So he moved on to the field of action--the institute.

The building was easily found--a large brick pile surrounded by grass, or rather, what would have been grass had juvenile footsteps permitted. To point the searcher for knowledge to the proper entrance, its name was displayed there in conspicuous letters.

The master was not so accessible; and he sat a long time in the parlor with several other visitors, and listened to the tinkling of sundry little bells, and saw passing in the distance sundry little processions armed with books and slates, until they were all properly impressed with an idea of the extent of the establishment and the awful responsibility of conducting it. At length, slowly and with dignity, entered Mr. Pushem.

"A teacher, you want?" modestly inquired Martin.

"Yes, sir," was the laconic reply; and a little silence ensued.

"For what, sir?" again modestly asked Martin.

"Well, sir, for several things; in fact, sir, for most any thing."

So, as Martin announced himself _au fait_ on all subjects, and the salary, without decided specification, was declared by the dignified principal to be unquestionably liberal, and the duties could not well be defined until he entered upon them; and as the only positive point was that he was to be niggard never in either time or labor, for the reason that time and labor were dust in the balance compared with the progress of immortal minds, the applicant was regularly enlisted under the banner of the INSTITUTE. He was to pay his board and lodging of course, said Mr. Pushem; and, of course, Martin did not expect to board and lodge without pay, though he had some remembrance of having done so occasionally; and so the matter was settled, and he returned home.

It took him small time to pack his bundle. His trunk had been detained a long time ago by a savage old dame for rent; and, knowing that the same gulf yawned ever for all succeeding trunks, he had never replaced it. So, packing his little bundle, I say, and leaving a kind message for his landlady with a fellow-lodger, to the purport that he would come back and pay her as soon as he could, he vanished from his old abode as effectually as if he had gone to another planet.

Loving parents tell us there is nothing so delightful as watching the daily progress of children in learning the alphabet of life. Not that villainous regiment called A B C, which merits execration as the first herald of toil and sorrow to the infantile heart, but that beautiful alphabet of rosy hues and rainbow colors, stamped on leaf, and flower, and fruit, and wave, and hill-side, and which, in conning over, the little eye learns to see, and the ear to hear; and the touch refines itself, and fragrance grows to be an idea; and the little gourmand makes its first essay in luxurious living on peaches and berries. Every little incident here is delightful. But not so pleasant is it to note the later wanderings of human beings in quest of that vague thing--_a living_. The traveller on the highway of life has grown weary now, and stumbles and plunges ankle-deep in all things disagreeable. He has heard the bird of promise sing so falsely, he knows how little the song is worth--he has grown sad while growing wise; and thus plodded on Martin Tryterlittle.

Some months had passed now since the roof of the institute first sheltered him; and the bread and bones and watery tea of the institute first nourished him; and the boys harassed him, and made fun of him; and twigged his wig, and put nettles in his bed in more than a metaphorical sense. His master had kept him like a toad under a harrow, (to use an inelegant but expressive phrase,) always doing, never done; the salary was yet unsettled, and the duties undefined, when one night the wig claimed a hearing.

"I am growing shabby," said the wig, "and you are no richer."

Not that these words were uttered in an audible tone, but the thought passed to Martin and was comprehended.

"You are growing shabby," sighed Martin, ruthfully gazing, "and I am no richer."

"O master mine!" quoth the wig, "do you see how you are walking on? You are growing poorer, not richer! What is to you all the glory of this concern, when you own not even a nail in the wall? You are just the stone they step on who mount up over you. What do you get for it? O master mine! you are an ass to stay!"

Martin was not inaccessible to reason; he was impressed daily more and more with the good sense of his old friend Horace.

"Et genus et virtus, nisi cum re, vilior algâ est."[168]

His rusty garments and diminished bundle told him that the wig spoke truth, and he prepared, not for a hegira, but for an official resignation. It took no long time for this, and his little hard bed in its windy corner was left empty the very next night. The boys felt that a great source of amusement had departed, and sincerely regretted his loss; and Mr. Pushem, after due astonishment at such blindness to advantages, disbursed to him the smallest possible sum as balance due, and advertised for another teacher.

O gold, gold! _Slave of the dark and dirty mine!_ what need to record how often thou didst beckon on luckless Martin Tryterlittle, only to flit from him further than ever? What matters how he slept in back offices and front basements, dreaming of mines somewhere at the antipodes, of which he was to have such a glittering slice--or of lovely landscapes away off in the vast wilderness of which he would one day be landed proprietor?--that is, as soon as he could persuade certain people into certain projects which seemed in theory mighty attractive, but proved in practice to have no attractions whatever--suffice to say that at last, quite desponding, he invested most part of his few remaining coin in the prepayment of an attic, and seated himself sadly at its window.

"I shall never be rich," quoth he; "fame and fortune!--well, let them go." His heart threw a sigh to the other one of the trio, and the wig took it up. "I was born for love," said the wig; "the first sweet words I remember came from the rosy lips of our pretty shop-girl, _What a love of a wig!_ I have never yet had a fair chance in life. What care those bankers and old money-scrapers for good looks? They are all gray and bald and wrinkled before their time. Put me on my own field, master, and SEE what _I_ can do!"

Perhaps this prompted Martin to lean further out of his window, and thus give his wig the full benefit of sunlight and the chance of making acquaintances; at least he did so; and doing so, he glanced across the street to a window nearly as high as his own, and saw there--what? Why, two bright eyes looking intently at him! He drew back; for Martin was diffident with the fair sex, and being, besides, innately a gentleman, it did not occur to him to embarrass the damsel with a rude stare. So he retreated; and the bright eyes also retreated and what was worse than all, a little, plump, white hand came out and closed the shutters.

Nothing more was seen all day; but he had ample occupation in conjecturing who it could be. No toil-worn seamstress ever had such a laughing glance and such a plump little hand; no, it was evidently a maiden quite above care for the morrow. Most anxiously he awaited the following morning, when about the same hour--that is, early day--could he believe his senses?--again the shutter was opened, and the bright eyes glanced up at him as if they too remembered. The little fairy was evidently a household fairy engaged in some fairy-like duties about the chamber, and ever and anon, as these brought her near the window, she glanced up at Martin.

That any loving and lovable woman should bestow a thought on _him_ was a leaf of paradise painted in dreams sometimes on the far-off days to come, when he should be rich and renowned; but that such bright, happy eyes should seek and rest on poor Martin Tryterlittle was hardly credible; as soon would he have expected Luna to step down from her orbit, peep into his attic, and say, "Good evening to you, Martin;" but so it was.

"It is _my_ doing," said the wig; "all mine!"

One day was the story of the next, and the next, and several more beyond. It is surprising how much may be learned of the inhabitants of a house from its exterior. As the beatific vision lasted but a short time each morning, a long day and night was left him to study its surroundings, and in a brief space of time he read the whole plain as a book. It was a handsome mansion, and a private one. There was a sensible housekeeping mistress there; for the railings were black and the knocker bright, and the steps were clean and the housemaids tidy; even the pavements were a pattern to the neighbors. There were order and industry throughout the establishment, evidently. All this and more besides he deciphered by processes whose intricate premises laughed to scorn quadratic equations, and yet he was never tired.

Martin had done, here and there and everywhere in his lifetime, a deal more head-work than he had ever been paid for, rather by compulsion; but now he labored _con amore_ on the loveliest subject life affords; and so far from wearying him, his wits grew brighter, his ideas received a new impetus, and, strange to say, the beneficial influence extended to his purse.

"I must have some honest occupation now," cried he; "it will never do to introduce myself as lounger in an attic window!" Yes! he really dreamed of an introduction.

"Let me see," (and he picked up his old dragon friend the newspaper;) "_wants, wants_--small salary, etc.; well, I will try." So he speedily bargained himself away to--no matter what, so it was honest, and went to work with a good-will.

It was pleasant, too, (strange he had never thought of it before;) it was pleasant to have a defined place among his fellow-mortals, and to feel that he could not now, as heretofore, be blown away on some windy day, and no one miss him.

Great changes are not wrought in a day. It took him some time to straighten out his line of existence and untie all the knots he had always been tying in it; to settle up scores with the past, and open accounts with the future--but it was all accomplished; and see now the life of Martin Tryterlittle.

He rose betimes, drank an elixir from those bright eyes perfectly intoxicating, and speeded to business. At eventide--where think you he spent his evenings? Why, in the back-parlor of that same handsome mansion, with little household fairy at his side, and papa smiling approval. He was no longer threadbare and shabby, and the only bit of deception about him--his wig--had been long ago confessed and forgiven.

"I'm a deal better than any hair that ever grew on any man's head," said the wig; "for if you live to be a hundred years old, I shall never be bald or gray."

"You will never be bald or gray," said Martin.

"It will never be bald or gray," laughed the little fairy.

On a certain evening about a year after this, Martin and his wig sat down for the last time to their dual converse; the next day a little lady was to be admitted, and the partnership would be a trio. Martin reclined on a sofa in his own domicil this night, and looked on a soft, bright carpet. His purse had filled up; nor was he unknown to fame--at least to a holy fame born of benevolence, which in after years lighted up many a desolated heart and hearth, and carved his name on structures where the homeless were sheltered and the hungry fed.

"Master mine," said the wig, "we mistook our track. Human life was not bestowed for the hoarding up of money--or men would have been all born with pockets; nor yet for a chase after fame. There are innate, loftier, and purer aspirations to be satisfied--the living soul craves something to love, and craves to be loved; and like sunshine to earth, that brings forth golden grain and sweet flowers, so pure love, the household sunshine, calls out wealth of thought and energy of action; and so comes fame, and so comes money!"

"Just so," said Martin; "you talk like a book!"

FOOTNOTE:

[168] Hor. Bk. ii. Sat. 5. Both birth and virtue, without money, are more worthless than seaweed.

THE POPE AND THE COUNCIL, BY JANUS.

II.

As the reader will have seen in our previous article, it became necessary to interrogate history at some length in order to elucidate and substantiate our arguments on the two points we have already set forth, namely, the real purpose of _Janus_, and the orthodoxy which the authors of this work profess. We have thus prepared the way for our examination of the historical and critical parts of _Janus_, for which he has found so many ardent admirers who would assign him a "position in the very front rank of science."

_Janus_ is principally hailed as a work of history, and as such, makes by no means ordinary or modest pretensions. That promiscuous array of matter presented to the reader in the third chapter, subdivided into thirty-three paragraphs with those numerous references to "_original authorities_," has dazzled so many eyes and overpowered so many minds, that they could not "help feeling convinced of its veracity." He has been held up as a "thorough Catholic" and a "learned canonist," and whether or not by any legitimate and scientific criterion _Janus_ merits these encomiums, the reader can infer from the unexceptionable authorities we have advanced.

We now ask the simple question, Has _Janus_ shown himself to be "a faithful and discriminating historian"? Having already appealed to the verdict of history on points of the very first importance, we may confine ourselves exclusively to the historical merits of _Janus's_ work. It cannot be expected that, within the space allowed to such an examination, we can touch upon every point; yet we trust to be able to make such selections as will be sufficient to clear up the most important historical questions upon which _Janus_ himself lays most stress. The following extract gives the key to the historical edifice of _Janus_:

"In this book the first attempt has been made to give a history of the hypothesis of papal infallibility, from its first beginnings to the end of the sixteenth century, when it appears in its complete form." (P. 24.)

To take away all historical basis from "ultramontanism," the authors go over the whole field of ecclesiastical history, and particularly the lives, both private and public, of the popes, together with their acts of administration, whether referring to the religious or civil government; in short, any thing and every thing is gathered "to bring forward a very dark side of the history of the papacy." The authors pledge themselves to oppose what they term the "ultramontane scheme," to which they will never submit, and hence their appeal to history, which should show that, since the ninth century, the constitution of the church has undergone a transformation neither sound nor natural, because in contradiction with that of the "ancient church." But the question which naturally suggests itself is, Who is responsible for this movement in the church, "preparing, like an advancing flood-tide, to take possession of its whole organic life"? A "powerful party which, in ignorance of past history or by deliberately falsifying it," is now about to complete its system and surround itself with an "impregnable bulwark," by the doctrine of infallibility. To ward off so fatal a catastrophe, _Janus_ enters this protest, based on history.

"Only when a universal conflagration of libraries had destroyed all historical documents, when easterns and westerns knew no more of their own early history than the Maories in New Zealand know of theirs now, and when, by a miracle, great nations had abjured their whole intellectual character and habits of thought, then, and not till then, would such a submission be possible." (P. 26.)

We have thus fairly stated the whole issue. True enough, the ultramontanes were not wise when they did not give over to the flames all libraries, with the exception of the Isidorian decretals, as the Mohammedans are known to have done with the library of Alexandria. Yet we are happy to say that such an expedient measure has not been resorted to, being thereby enabled to trace the truth or falsehood of this "mighty programme" of ultramontanism which _Janus_ is pleased to honor with the name of "Papalism."

We can easily dispense with the alleged historical misconceptions of the middle ages, and draw upon the very same historical documents with which _Janus_ so confidently proclaims his victory. Attention has already been directed to the peculiar mode of warfare pursued by _Janus_, namely, to its purely negative and destructive character. The third chapter bears the title of "Papal Infallibility," (pp. 31-346,) and hence we are led to expect a clear, authentic, and fair exposition of the doctrine in question, and then all other arguments which, either from scripture and patristic authority or from history, could be brought to bear against such a doctrine. No reasonable man, much less a theologian, could object to such a mode of proceeding. The authors of _Janus_, wishing to cede to none in their loyal devotion to Catholic truth, could make ample use of that liberty of scientific discussion and historical investigation for or against the question of infallibility, and no charge of "radical aversion," as they seemed to apprehend, could be brought against their work.

Since _Janus_ openly avows his purpose of disproving the doctrine of infallibility, why does he not give such an explanation of it as is taught by its most able and acknowledged defenders? What right has he to produce a version of it to suit his own fancy? Why bring up arguments militating, indeed, against his _own_ theory, but in nowise conclusive against the doctrine as laid down by its own exponents? That it may not appear as if we made unfounded charges against _Janus_, we will subjoin his own definition and development of the doctrine he sees fit to attack:

"When we speak of the church, we mean the pope, says the Jesuit Gretser. Taken by itself as the community of believers, clergy and bishops, the church, according to Cardinal Cajetan, is the slave of the pope." (P. 31.)

Apparently, our authors would make this the ultramontanist tenet: henceforward the "_l'église c'est moi_" would be the genuine expression of papal infallibility. We know of no theologian who sustains any such thesis as the above, and we had expected a _reference_ to the authorities quoted; but none is given, and we little heed the utterances attributed to them. Nothing, indeed, is easier than to place a question in a false point of view, either by exaggeration or misrepresentation, in order to make it appear ludicrous and absurd.

"It is a fundamental principle of the ultramontane view that, when we speak of the church, its rights and its action, we always mean the pope, and the pope only." (P. 31.)

There is no treatise on the church in which any such definition is to be found, or any author who declares the pope alone to be the church, in any possible sense or conception. _Janus_ delights to cite Bellarmine as one of such ultramontane view. Now, we confidently assert that nowhere in his elaborate treatises on the _Roman Pontiff_ or the _Church Militant_ any similar definition to the one alleged can be found. Who is there who does not know that clear and concise notion given by Bellarmine, in which he has been followed by all standard works? For he says,

"Nostra autem sententia est, Ecclesiam unam et veram esse cœtum hominum ejusdem Christianæ fidei professione, et eorundem sacramentorum communione colligatum sub regimine legitumorum pastorum ac præcipue unius Christi in terris Vicarii Romani Pontificis."[169]

"Our doctrine is, that the one true church is that society of men which is bound together by the profession of the same Christian faith under the government of their lawful pastors, and especially of one vicar of Christ on the earth, the Roman pontiff."

The following passages would exhibit the ultramontane doctrine of infallibility and its consequences:

"God has gone to sleep, because in his place his ever-wakeful and infallible vicar on earth rules, as lord of the world, and dispenser of grace and punishment." (P. 32.)

"The inevitable result of the principle would speedily bring us to this point, that the essence of infallibility consists in the pope's signature to a decree hastily drawn up by a congregation or a single theologian." (Preface, xxv.)

"Rome is an ecclesiastical address and inquiry-office, or rather, a standing oracle, which can give at once an infallible solution of every doubt, speculative and practical.... With ultramontanes, the authority of Rome, and the typical example of Roman morals and customs, are the embodiment of the moral and ecclesiastical law." (P. 35.)

"What is called Catholicity can only be attained in the eyes of the court of Rome, by every one translating himself and his ideas, on every subject that has any connection with religion, into Italian." (P. 37.)

"Infallibility is a principle which will extend its dominion over men's minds more and more, till it has coerced them into subjection to every papal pronouncement in matters of religion, morals, politics, and social science."

"Every pope, however ignorant of theology, will be free to make what use he likes of his power of _dogmatic creativeness_, and to erect his own thoughts into the common belief, binding on the whole church." (P. 39.)

"A papal decision, itself the result of a direct divine inspiration."

"Every other authority will pale beside the living oracle of the Tiber, which speaks with plenary inspiration."

"What use in tedious investigation of Scripture, what use in wasting time on the difficult study of tradition, which requires so many kinds of preliminary knowledge, when a single utterance of the infallible pope ... and a telegraphic message becomes an axiom and article of faith?" (P. 40.)

"And how will it be in the future?" asks _Janus_; "the rabbis say, on every apostrophe in the Bible hang whole mountains of hidden sense, and this will apply equally to papal bulls." (P. 41.)

We have been rather copious in our extracts from _Janus_ in order to give him a fair hearing. The question which first presents itself to a candid mind is, Has _Janus_ given a just and authentic explanation of the doctrine of infallibility? We answer most emphatically, No! Never has a doctrine been more unfairly represented than this "ultramontane" one by our authors. No one will choose to call it fair and equitable to disfigure and distort in divers ways the doctrine of an opponent, how much soever it may be against our own convictions. Those who make parade of their "scientific criticism" can least resort to such tactics with a view to seek popularity and win the smiles of the uninformed and ignorant among their readers, as the authors of _Janus_ have done. Who would fain recognize this doctrine under the colors and shades of this portrait sketched by _Janus_? Bellarmine is the great champion of infallibility. (P. 318.) Yet, nowhere does this eminent divine teach that a papal decision is the result of _divine_ inspiration, nor does he attribute to the pope any power of dogmatic _creativeness_--much less that he can erect his own thoughts into universal belief binding the church. "The sovereign pontiff," says Bellarmine,[170] "when he teaches the universal church, cannot err either in his decrees of faith or in moral precepts which are binding on the whole church, and in such things as are necessary to salvation and in themselves, that is, _essentially_ good or evil." Another authority well known has the following clear _exposé_ of this question: "The subject-matter of such irreformable judgments of the sovereign pontiff is limited to questions of dogmatic and moral import. We distinguish a two-fold character in the pope, namely, considering him as a private individual or _doctor privatus_, and by virtue of his office as chief pastor and as the universal doctor and teacher of all the faithful, appointed by Christ. The pope is considered as _universal teacher_ when, using his public authority as the supreme guide of the church, (_supremus ecclesiæ magister_,) he proposes something to the whole church, obliging all the faithful under anathema, or pain of heresy, to believe the article thus proposed with internal assent and divine faith. The pope when teaching under these conditions is said to speak _ex cathedra_. We do not here speak of the pope as an individual teacher, (_doctor privatus_,) since every one agrees on this, that the pope, just as well as other men, is liable to err, and his judgment may be reversed."[171]

Now, _Janus_ does away with this distinction by comparing it to "wooden iron" invented merely as an expedient hypothesis, whereas all theologians of repute agree on this difference, as well as on the _essential_ conditions of the _ex cathedra_ decisions. If there be some difficulties and minor differences among theologians on papal decrees, this by no means affects the value of this important and necessary distinction itself. Even the decrees of an œcumenical council may give rise to similar differences among theologians. It is nothing less than a falsehood on the part of _Janus_ that the cause of this inerrancy claimed for the pope as universal teacher is due to direct divine and plenary inspiration. All theologians are unanimous in asserting merely a _divine assistance_ to guard against error, just as the church herself is divinely guided by the Holy Spirit, promised by Christ to reside with her for ever. There cannot be any necessity for substituting inspiration or a new revelation, since the infallible _magisterium_ in the church is exercised in the two-fold duty of teaching and preserving _all those truths_ which she has received as a _sacred deposit_ from her divine Founder. Moreover, it is supposed that the pope when issuing such decrees to the universal church, binding all the faithful, proceeds with that caution and prudence which such weighty acts demand, that he has full liberty to assure himself of all human counsel and human means to find the true and genuine sense of Scripture and tradition. Alluding, therefore, to _ignorant popes_ making use of their power of dogmatic creativeness and erecting their "own thoughts" into dogmas of faith, is an appeal to prejudice and commonplace mockery wholly unworthy of writers who would be admired for their calm and dignified scientific labors. Other opponents of papal infallibility have never gainsaid that _at least_ this doctrine has always found many and able adherents, who have advanced strong arguments claiming the serious consideration of every theologian and thinking Christian, and therefore recommended by most respectable authority. But _Janus_ comes forward to stamp this "ultramontane doctrine" with the stigma of absurdity and ridicule, and declares its advocates to be miserable sycophants, devoid of all learning or honesty of intention. (P. 320.)

The references we have given exhibit the doctrine of infallibility in such colors as scarcely to be recognized, and all advocates of the doctrine will repudiate such an unfair and arbitrary statement. The cunning insinuation that infallibility invests the popes with personal sanctity and integrity of morals, is no less captious and shallow. To what purpose those tirades on the private lives of the popes, or the extravagances of the _Curia_, and the administrative measures of the civil government, etc.? The supposition as though the whole church, that is, all the faithful, would have to accept falsehood for truth, vice for virtue, is a play of _Janus's_ imagination. For those who uphold papal infallibility exclude the possibility of such an issue on account of the intimate union necessarily existing between the church and its spiritual head. According to the promises of Christ, that union--eminently one of faith--will never be severed, since Christ himself commanded this obedience of the flock to Peter and his successors. It cannot for a moment be supposed that the wise Lord of his vineyard sanctioned an obligation to accept falsehood for truth, or vice for virtue. The infallible _magisterium_ of the church would be fatally compromised if the faithful were commanded by lawful authority to give interior assent to a false doctrine. So much for the intrinsic falsehood of the hypothesis of _Janus_. Yet he attempts to surround it with an authoritative garb by citing Bellarmine as maintaining "that if the pope were to err by prescribing sins and forbidding virtues, the church would be bound to consider sins good and virtues evil, unless she chose to sin against conscience." (P. 318.)

Who does not at once see this terrible alternative by which _Janus_ triumphantly proves from the author quoted "that whatever doctrine it pleases the pope to prescribe, the church must receive"? Having the work of Bellarmine before our eyes, with the above passage in the context, we were greatly amazed, to say the least, to see how the _entire_ proposition conveys just the very opposite meaning of what _Janus_ would induce his readers to believe. Here is the argument in question:

"The pope cannot err in teaching doctrines of faith, nor is he liable to err in giving moral precepts binding the whole church in matters of _essential_ good and evil. For if this were the case, that is, if the pope erred in matters of essential good or evil, he would necessarily err also in faith; for Catholic faith teaches that every virtue is good and every vice evil. Now, if the pope erred by commanding vices or prohibiting virtues, the church would be bound to believe vices good and virtues evil, unless she chose to sin against conscience."[172]

Bellarmine's meaning evidently is that such an issue becomes impossible. This _reductio ad absurdum_, or showing to what contradiction a denial of his thesis would lead, has been exhibited by our authors as a _bona fide_ tenet of Bellarmine! The passage itself is _partly_ transcribed with minute reference, so that it is beyond the courtesy of even a mild critique to exonerate _Janus_ from the charge of deliberate dishonesty in this instance.

Hitherto we have confined ourselves to a critical examination of a doctrine against which _Janus_ directs his assaults. In the first place, we submitted his version of the same, and afterward the authentic explanation by those whom our authors acknowledge to be its most able exponents. The inevitable conclusion which forces itself on every mind is, that _Janus_ has developed the doctrine of infallibility to suit his own fancy, and consequently the arguments he brings forward, supposing them true for discussion's sake, would indeed undermine the position assumed by himself, but in no way affect the genuine one propounded by his opponents. In order to make good his arguments from church history and canonical sources against the stand-point taken by the acknowledged advocates of infallibility, these three conditions must be verified, 1st. That the pope acted in his capacity of universal teacher, using his public authority as supreme head of the church; 2d. That his judgments appertain to matters of doctrinal belief and moral law necessary to salvation. 3d. That he proposes such things to the faithful, under pain of heresy, to be believed with interior assent as of divine faith, that is, a revealed truth. There is the simple issue between _Janus_ and his adversaries. Has he advanced one single decree of any pope, invested with these essential conditions, obliging to believe falsehood and heresy or commanding to commit an evil and absolutely vicious action under the name of virtue? We doubt whether any candid and discriminating historian will maintain that _Janus_ has accomplished any such task. However, that the reader may not suspect us of narrowing the domain of papal infallibility, we will quote a passage from an able and warm adherent of this doctrine, whose writings are well known as by no means liable to any suspicion of under-statement:

"In the case of any given document, we have to consider, from the context and circumstances, which portion of it _expresses_ such doctrine; for many statements, even doctrinal, may be introduced, not as authoritative determinations, but in the way of argument and illustration. Many papal pronouncements, though they may introduce doctrinal reasons, yet are not doctrinal pronouncements at all, but disciplinary enactments; the pope's immediate end in issuing them is, not that certain things may be believed, but that certain things may be done. If the doctrinal reasons, even for a doctrinal declaration, are not infallible, much less can infallibility be claimed for the doctrinal reasons of a disciplinarian enactment. Then again, the pope may give some doctrinal decision as head of the church, and yet not as universal teacher. Some individual may ask at his hands, and receive, practical direction on the doctrine to be followed in a particular case, while yet the pope has no thought whatever of determining the question for the whole church and for all time. Much less, as Benedict XIV. remarks, does the fact of his acting officially on some moral opinion fix on it the seal of infallibility as certainly true. Nor, lastly, can any conclusive inference be drawn in favor of some doctrinal practice, from the fact of its not having been censured or prohibited. The pontiff of the day, whether from intellectual or moral defect, may even omit censures and prohibitions which are greatly desirable in the church's interest, or enact laws of an unwise and prejudicial character."[173]

As we have already insinuated, _Janus_ makes this infallibility extend to the private conduct of the popes, to their particular sayings and to all other things which were merely preliminary steps to their official measures. Now, it is certain, as is frequently urged by ultramontanes, that the pope, in becoming pope, does not cease to be a man, and to have his own private opinions, and not being infallible in these, by the very force of terms, they may be erroneous.

What we might thus far have conceded to _Janus_ without great injury to the doctrine he opposes, we now proceed to question, and examine this "history of the hypothesis of papal infallibility, from its first beginnings to the end of the sixteenth century." He has indeed resuscitated weighty questions, and not unfrequently antiquated difficulties which we could point out from works printed for three hundred years and more. In order to be brief and clear, we shall begin with the alleged "forgeries" upon which _Janus_ insists throughout his book, and thereafter interrogate history as to the many "papal errors," usurpations, and encroachments.

* * * * *

NOTE.--The terms "faith," "heresy," and "under anathema," in the foregoing article, must be understood in their general and not their restricted sense. That is to say, whenever the pope declares or defines any thing which is to be believed with absolute interior assent, this is to be considered as belonging to faith, whether it be technically a proposition _de fide_, or one which is only virtually and implicitly contained in a dogma. So, also, when he condemns an opinion which is indirectly and virtually contrary to a dogma of faith, this condemnation is of equal authority with the condemnation of an opinion technically called heretical. The anathema need not be formally expressed, or a special censure annexed, if it is made manifest that all Catholics are forbidden to hold the opinion condemned under pain of grievous sin. The monition of the Council of the Vatican at the end of the decree on Catholic faith expressly enjoins on all Catholics the duty of rejecting not only all heresies, that is, opinions in point-blank contradiction to the dogmas of Catholic faith, but all errors approaching more or less to heresy which are condemned by the holy see.--EDITOR OF CATHOLIC WORLD.

TO BE CONTINUED.

FOOTNOTES:

[169] _De Eccl. Milit._ lib. iii. cap. 2.

[170] _De Rom. Pontif._ lib. iii. capp. 2, 3, 5.

[171] _Theol. Wirceburg._ tom. i. De Princip. Direct. n. 190.

[172] _De Rom. Pontif._ lib. iv. cap. 5. edit. Venet. 1 vol. p. 779.

[173] _The Authority of Doctrinal Decisions._ By Dr. Ward. Pp. 50, 51.

THE YOUNG VERMONTERS.